The Challenge

The fashion and apparel industry is one of the world's most environmentally intensive sectors. It accounts for approximately 2–8% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — surpassing the combined emissions of the aviation and shipping sectors (UNEP, 2019). Textile production is also responsible for around 20% of global clean water pollution, driven largely by dyeing and finishing processes (European Parliament, 2025).

Manufacturing more broadly adds to this burden. In 2022, the industrial sector emitted 9 gigatonnes of CO₂, representing 25% of total global emissions (IEA, 2023). 

Reducing these impacts requires action across the full product lifecycle - from how products are designed and sourced, to how they are used, repaired, and recovered at end of life. A key barrier is visibility: without reliable data on where emissions, waste, and hazardous materials occur across a supply chain, manufacturers struggle to act.

The EU is responding with a suite of regulations designed to make that data mandatory. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) will require a Digital Product Passport (DPP) for nearly all products sold in the EU - a digital record capturing a product's origin, materials, environmental impact, and end-of-life guidance (European Commission, 2025). The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) frameworks add further reporting obligations. Together, these create both a compliance challenge and a significant opportunity for companies that can help manufacturers meet them.

For many businesses - particularly SMEs - aggregating supply chain data, upgrading systems, and maintaining traceability across global suppliers is a substantial burden. Kinset was founded to address exactly this.

Circular Solution

Kinset's origins are rooted in direct experience of the problem it now solves. The company was co-founded by Katie O'Riordan, an entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in sustainable fashion design, manufacturing, and supply chain operations. While running her own sustainable fashion label, Katie found herself unable to determine with confidence whether her products were truly sustainable - and found that every tool available felt more like greenwashing than genuine transparency. Seeking a definitive, data-driven solution, she partnered with Alan Giles, a serial tech entrepreneur, to build Kinset.

Kinset, a participant of the 2025 CIRCULÉIRE Venture Accelerator, is a green tech company specialising in apparel and consumer goods brands. Its core offering is a connected product platform that creates a digital ecosystem around each product - merging live supply chain data, materials information, certifications, and compliance requirements into a single connected record. This shifts sustainability from retrospective reporting to proactive design decisions.

At the heart of the platform is a Digital Product Passport builder that gives each product a unique digital ID, built on GS1 Digital Link standards - the globally recognised system used for product identification and supply chain tracking across retail, healthcare, and logistics. This connects each product to structured data across its lifecycle, from raw materials through to end of life, and allows manufacturers to get started with simple data inputs, then integrate with ERP, PLM, and PIM systems as they scale.

The platform automatically captures key sustainability metrics - carbon footprint, water usage, and material sourcing - through real-time lifecycle assessment (LCA) tools aligned with EU Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR). It generates compliance-ready reports and consumer-facing DPP features including repair guides, resale pathways, and disposal guidance - linking circular services directly into each product's digital record.

Through strategic partnerships with advanced traceability providers, Kinset also supports verification of product origin and durability. Irish brands including Caroline Duffy Designs and McNutt of Donegal are already using the platform, with McNutt - a certified BCorp - describing it as a natural next step in their sustainability journey.

Climate Impact

A 2024 European Parliament study on DPPs in the textile sector found that a lack of comprehensive product information is one of the key barriers to circularity - preventing effective repair, reuse, sorting, and recycling at scale (Legardeur and Ospital, 2024). DPPs directly address this barrier by making supply chain data visible and actionable for the first time.

Kinset delivers impact through two connected mechanisms. First, by giving companies real-time, verifiable data on where emissions, waste, and inefficiency occur across their supply chains, it enables targeted action - refining product design, switching to lower-impact materials, and improving end-of-life routing. Second, consumer-facing features like repair guides, resale pathways, and disposal guidance embedded in each product's DPP directly extend product lifespans, reducing demand for new production and the resource extraction that comes with it.

The European Parliament study concludes that a fully deployed circular DPP for textiles could promote circularity by improving repair, reuse, recycling, and end-of-life management, enable producers to reduce raw material consumption, and provide the data infrastructure needed to assess and progressively reduce a product's environmental footprint across its full lifecycle (Legardeur and Ospital, 2024). Kinset's platform is designed to deliver exactly this kind of infrastructure for Irish and European apparel and consumer goods brands.

Replicability

EU regulations are rapidly expanding the market for DPP solutions. The global DPP market was valued at USD $275.1 million in 2025 and is forecast to reach USD $2,996.1 million by 2033, with Europe holding over 35% market share in 2025 (Grand View Research, 2025).

A number of companies are developing comparable DPP platforms:

• TrusTrace (Sweden) provides a supply chain traceability platform for fashion and textiles, enabling DPPs through data standardisation and compliance reporting.

  
  

• Circularise (Netherlands) offers a blockchain-powered traceability platform supporting DPPs for end-to-end supply chain visibility and secure data sharing.

  
  

• Kezzler (Norway) delivers a connected products platform using digital product identities to manage DPPs, lifecycle events, and circular business models at the item level.

  
  

• EON (New York) develops digital ID technology for product traceability from farm to end of life, powering DPPs to meet policy demands and enable circular business models.

  
  

• Avery Dennison (California) provides smart labelling and RFID solutions that support DPP implementation for supply chain transparency and sustainability tracking.