MILAN — Although sustainability has faced disruption and political backlash globally in recent years, and the European Union has delayed or rolled back some of its most stringent measures, the Digital Product Passport is set to become a reality in Europe.

The EU is expected to issue a sector-specific delegated act for fashion and textiles in the fourth quarter of 2027, followed by an 18-month compliance window, making 2029 the earliest plausible enforcement date.

Brands may still view it as another regulatory and reporting burden, and far off, but it will eventually become a market-access requirement for any company seeking to sell in the EU.

What if, by anticipating the regulatory frameworks by a few years, companies could also unlock more business-minded features?

That was the question that prompted two fashion professionals to take the technology a step further, with ambitions to turn blockchain-enriched products into smart objects that meet needs beyond compliance and transparency.

Eliana Kuo, a former Etro and Giorgio Armani manager, and Lor Albrighi, a trained tailor who counted Giovanni Gastel among his clients in the mid-2010s, ventured into Big Tech in 2016, seeking to create an end-to-end technological infrastructure for fashion products — and spaces.

The start-up Spin, which stands for Smart Products Infrastructure Network, was established in San Francisco and now operates between the Bay Area and Taipei. Offering hardware and software, it allows physical products and spaces to be identifiable, operable and AI-ready — essentially tracking them throughout their life cycle with product data incrementally enriched as the object accumulates use.

“The industry has spent decades building systems around the customer. The next shift is to build continuity around the product itself, and its ownership… For brands, a product no longer disappears after the first sale. Quite the opposite, it appears as a persistent digital and physical asset, creating Product Lifetime Value through ownership, services, resale royalty fees and circularity,” Albrighi explained in an interview.

The company has already found a high-profile partner in Fendi, for which it custom-adapted its tool to track the label’s high-value products across different internal locations, thus reducing the manual effort required to locate, verify, hand off and reconcile items.

“The result is not simply better visibility. It is lower operational friction, faster product handling and greater control over value that would otherwise leak through product blindness,” Spin wrote in its white paper study “From Product Passports to Smart Products.”

Spin — which runs on a namesake proprietary operating system — is compatible with most blockchain-based providers of Digital Product Passports, hence ensuring traceability and authenticity. But it can also unlock digital twins for 3D renderings and readies the products for AI-powered management across logistics, transactions, as well as post-sale services.

It’s perhaps in the latter that Spin is bringing about the biggest novelty, streamlining a range of post-manufacturing operations. For one, it improves the brand-consumer relationship when providing care and repair services, it helps minimize the chance of lost garments at professional laundries, and it facilitates secondhand sales or take-back programs.

According to Albrighi, this provides value for both consumers and brands.

For the former, a Spin-enabled garment featuring washable Dual RFID tags can essentially be uniquely and reliably tracked at one’s preferred laundromat. Its ownership can be transferred to a new customer when selling it on secondhand platforms such as Vinted and Vestiaire Collective or Spin’s own peer-to-peer resale hub.

For brands, advantages range from tracking garment samples lent to magazines for editorial shoots, mobilizing products across different logistics hubs, through to acquiring new customers when their products are sold in the secondary market and their ownership transferred via Spin itself.

“Objects evolve from liabilities into appreciating assets within an accumulative marketplace,” Albrighi said.

Spin is the result of eight years of research and development started in 2016 and handled by a team of about 10 tech, fashion and entertainment professionals in addition to Albrighi and Kuo, who serve as co-chief executive officers of the company.

The technology was shaped through the EU Horizon 2020 Trick program and contributed to the CWA 18291:2025, a study by the European Committee for Standardization on textile supply-chain data for Digital Product Passports.