Control Union partners with Fairly Made to strengthen textile traceability and transparency

Control Union are pleased to announce a new collaboration with Fairly Made. The partnership will focus on bringing trusted certification data and digital traceability closer together.

The collaboration comes at a time where sustainability is at the center of the textile industry, with a growing focus on greater transparency, product level traceability and enhanced sustainability and compliance reporting. Digital Product Passports are expected to play an important role in this transition, enabling products to carry accessible digital information about sourcing, materials, certifications and supply chain journeys.

Meeting these evolving expectations requires both effective digital traceability and credible, independently verified sustainability information, two areas that Fairly Made and Control Union bring together through this collaboration.

Bringing together traceability and independent certification

Fairly Made is a SaaS platform supporting textile and leather brands in supply chain traceability, impact measurement and transparency. Working with over 35,000 suppliers and more than 120 brands, it also covers ecodesign, supply chain risk detection and consumer communication. The Fairly Made platform future-proofs brands against a tightening global compliance agenda. Whether preparing for the EU’s upcoming Digital Product Passport (expected 2027) or navigating active US UFLPA tracing requirements, the core requirement remains the same: brands must have audit-ready product data capable of withstanding independent scrutiny.

Control Union provides independent certification, inspection and verification services across global supply chains, with extensive experience in textile certification and chain of custody.

Control Union’s independently verified certification data, combined with Fairly Made’s digital infrastructure, including traceability solutions such as QR code enabled product information, have the potential to support more efficient compliance processes and strengthen confidence in sustainability claims. By combining traceability platforms with trusted third-party assurance, brands can benefit from greater confidence in the accuracy, credibility and reliability of the information being shared across their supply chains.

The partnership’s initial focus will be on supporting mutual clients, developing joint market initiatives and identifying where certification information can be used more efficiently within digital traceability processes.

For brands, a closer link between certification and traceability can replace manual, reactive certificate chasing with access to more current certification information. Relevant records can be checked against Control Union data, which strengthens the validation of transaction-level information and reduces residual fraud risk. Certification data also becomes more visible within Fairly Made, which narrows the evidence gap at audit and gives brands greater confidence in the evidence behind their product claims.

For suppliers, the partnership addresses a different problem. Suppliers already provide large amounts of information to brands, certification bodies and traceability platforms. Much of this information already exists, yet suppliers are still asked to upload it again, sometimes several times, for different customers. The partnership aims to remove unnecessary steps from the existing process. For suppliers, this means uploading documents once rather than repeatedly, answering fewer duplicate requests and making fewer manual errors.

“Certification already generates a significant amount of trusted supply chain data. As companies increasingly rely on digital product and traceability systems, this verified information must become easier to access and use. Through our collaboration with Fairly Made, we aim to connect certification data more efficiently, reduce duplicate data requests across the supply chain and preserve the independence and integrity that give certification its value. .” commented Lonneke de Kort, Business unit manager, textile, recycling & alternative material certification, Control Union.

Responding to changing product transparency requirements

Brands are now facing growing expectations around supply chain transparency, sustainability claims and product-level information.

Digital Product Passports and other European regulatory developments are increasing the importance of structured, reliable product data. Under the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), textiles are among the priority product groups, with the textile-specific delegated act currently planned for Q4 2027. The EU Digital Product Passport Registry has already been operational since July 2026, signaling the gradual move from regulatory framework to implementation. More broadly, brands are moving towards digital operating models in which information must be connected across products, suppliers and materials, and credible enough to support decisions, disclosures and market claims. At the same time, companies need practical ways to obtain and manage information across complex international supply chains without continuously increasing the reporting burden placed on suppliers.

Together, the two organizations aim to explore how verified certification information can be more easily accessed and used by brands to support traceability and product information. This is part of Control Union’s continued evolution as a modern assurance partner, bringing expertise into the data environments where supply chain decisions are increasingly made, while keeping verification independent and meaningful.

“Our clients have been asking for this, and it reflects a shift we have been anticipating for some time: certification documents already contain more information than brands and suppliers ever get to use. By connecting Control Union’s independently verified certification data into Fairly Made’s traceability infrastructure, we aim to cut the time spent chasing and rechecking those documents and to surface data that today sits unused inside them. This is how brands will move from collecting certificates to making decisions on verified data.” expressed Laure Betsch, Co-founder and CEO, Fairly Made.

Looking Ahead

In 2027, Control Union and Fairly Made aim to begin connecting selected certification information directly into the Fairly Made platform. For brands, this could mean being able to check certificate status, scope and validity against Control Union records without repeatedly requesting the same documents from suppliers.

The longer-term opportunity goes beyond the exchange of certification documents. It is about making assurance more connected, more accessible and more relevant to the way businesses now work with data.