Elevating Care Instructions with a Digital Product Passport

You’ve taken the time to create high-quality, sustainable garments for your customers — but you’ve got to bring your market up to speed on how to take good care of them. A laundry disaster drives your customers away and undermines the intention you’ve put into your garments to create sustainable, lasting garments.

The average consumer does not know how to care for their garments properly. With a Digital Product Passport, you can provide clear care instructions that can help your consumers avoid those major laundry mishaps.

So what is a digital product passport?

A DPP is a digital record containing essential information about a product like its materials, manufacturing processes, product journey, recycling instructions, and care instructions.

As a company, the DPP enhances your transparency and promotes more sustainable practices by enabling you to cut through the noise and communicate with your consumers directly. You empower your consumers to make sustainable decisions regarding purchasing, reusing, recycling, and caring for their garments when you give them more information through a DPP. 

The benefits of DPP care instructions

At this point, you might be asking—don’t clothes already come with care instructions? Yes, but traditional care instructions don’t measure up. 

Laundry symbols are confusing and the fact of the matter is… most people don’t understand them. Even if your consumers can read the symbols, the instructions are often oversimplified. For example, you may label clothing dry clean only because the at home care instructions are too complex to include on a label.

Clearer care instructions help consumers and the environment. Here’s how:

Debunking care misinformation

Consumers believe all sorts of old wives tales about garment care that are totally validated by oversimplified care instructions. Here’s a handful of some of the myths that don’t really hold up:

1. Hot water cleans better than cold water: Back in ye old times, traditional detergents needed hot water to activate properly. Nowadays, hot water is actually worse for clothing and corrodes your consumer’s garments faster.
2. More detergent leads to cleaner clothes: With detergent, less is more. If you use too much detergent, the washing machine is not able to rinse all the detergent out, leaving a film on the clothing that can trap dirt and moisture leading to increased bacteria. Dirty clothes are far likelier to wind up in a trash can than in a donation pile — so poor washing undermines your circularity efforts.
3. Clothing should be washed after every wear: Over-washing clothes breaks down the fabrics fibers and wears the clothing out quicker, driving your consumers to replace garments quickly and diminishing the sustainability of your garments.

Clothing myths persist because traditional clothing labels aren’t providing clear or detailed care instructions. Digital Product Passports can. Instead of interpreting confusing symbols or squinting at tiny writing, learners can just scan a QR code and find all the care information they could need.

Providing transparent communication

In the age of social media, blogs, and email content, it’s clear that consumers prioritize communication with the brands they purchase from. The digital product passport serves to meet this expectation by sharing, transparently, the materials included in the garment and how to best care for them.

Brands can assume that their consumers are interested in learning more about their garments. The DPP provides a new level of consumer trust in your product and, as a result, encourages them to look to your products for future purchases.

Promoting sustainability

On average, clothing care accounts for 30% of a garment’s total overall carbon footprint. That means great garment care can actually help the environment. For example, washing clothes in cold water extends the life of the garment and saves energy—90% of the energy washing machines use is spent on heating the water. 

The Digital Product passport can also help consumers understand the environmental impact of their care choices. Traditional care instructions overemphasize washing information and completely neglect other important aspects like storage, handling, and repair which are also essential to increasing the lifespan of a garment. 

By including these often-ignored aspects of clothing care, the Digital Product Passport can promote more sustainable practices and low energy choices.

Driving circularity

Properly cared for garments last longer and look nicer. This allows your consumers to enjoy their clothing for a longer period of time. Extending the life of a piece of clothing by an extra nine months can reduce it’s carbon, waste and water footprints by around 20–30% each.

When you lengthen a garment’s lifespan, you increase opportunities to resell pre-loved items. DPPs can also provide clear instructions for recycling or reselling, so it’s not only possible—it’s easy. Lengthening garment life, creating chances to resell pre-loved items, and providing easy recycling pathways are all ways companies using a DPP champion a circular economy.

How Charming Trim can help

Traditional care labels are stuck in the past. Say goodbye to the old limitations of care instructions and hello to a sustainable, higher quality customer experience.

Curious about how DPPs can transform your products? Learn more about what Charming.DIGI can do for your brand.