UK Fashion Brand Explores Blockchain for Improving Traceability

UK-based fashion brand, Sarah Regensburger, is looking to apply blockchain technology to improving supply chain traceability. The announcement was made on the LinkedIn social network on February 29.

The British fashion industry giant strives to achieve an unprecedented level of interaction within the entire supply chain - from material suppliers to customers. Therefore, this new blockchain-based solution would allow to track all processes, so the customer would be able to check where the product has come from. Such a solution will significantly reduce forgery and facilitate the product authenticity verification.

Allegedly, a demo of the new solution will be presented at the Paris Fashion Week, where the biggest players of the fashion industry will gather. In case of success, even more brands might turn their attention to blockchain and other innovations.

Global Fashion Can Benefit from Blockchain

World fashion brands often face problems when it comes to verifying the authenticity of their brands due to a huge number of fakes on the market. As of now, people can often tell a fake from the original only by the product’s price, as fakes are much cheaper than real branded products would be. Blockchain technology can potentially solve this problem.

Coinidol.com, a world blockchain news outlet, previously reported that Italy is exploring the possibilities of blockchain in the textile industry within their Made in Italy project. The country is considered to be the leading exporter of wool, yarn and silk fabrics, so they face lots of problems with counterfeiting. That’s why traceability through the entire supply chain is so important.

Solutions based on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies could potentially solve this problem making counterfeiting very difficult if not impossible at all. 

Luxury Brands See their Advantage

The companies that produce and sell luxury products suffer from counterfeits the most, as their goods are expensive and therefore authenticity verification is really important. If you buy a Louis Vuitton and spend a couple of thousands on the product, you wouldn’t want to end up with a fake.

It seems they realise it pretty well at Louis Vuitton. That is why the company concluded a partnership with ConsenSys and Microsoft to develop and launch a distributed ledger platform that would allow for tracing the entire supply chain of their products as well as authenticity verification.   

Inability to fight counterfeits might cost luxury brands their clients, so they clearly need a solution to ensure authenticity of their products and making it easy to check. Blockchain technology can have the potential to solve this issue. While world fashion giants are trying to explore its possibilities, we can only guess, if it is a start of blockchain expansion into the industry.