From Spreadsheet to Passport: How Image Wear is Getting Ready for the EU's New Rules - Without the Chaos
In a busy product team, the workday rarely looks like strategy. It looks like email threads chasing a missing EN ISO certificate, spreadsheet columns tracking which supplier sent what, and the quiet anxiety of knowing there is a compliance deadline on the horizon — and the data simply is not ready for it.
Image Wear knows this feeling well. As a Finnish corporate and professional workwear brand supplying B2B clients across the Nordics — healthcare, hospitality, logistics, industry — the company manages a complex, multi-tier supplier base spread across Europe and Asia. Its products carry some of the most demanding certifications in the textile industry: EN ISO, flame-retardant, hi-vis, PPE. And until recently, the management of those certifications was almost entirely manual.
That is changing, and the reason is not just efficiency - it is the EU’s digital product passport (DPP).
A Regulation That Cannot Wait Until 2029
The DPP becomes mandatory for textiles under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) from around 2029. For many brands, that still sounds like a future problem. It is not.
Products ordered in 2027 go to market in 2029. The data behind them — fibre composition, material origin, certifications, recycled content, substances of concern documentation — needs to exist before the order is placed. And collecting that data from a multi-tier supplier base takes time: time to build the requests, time to wait for responses, time to structure what arrives in fifteen different formats.
For workwear brands specifically, the challenge is sharper than it is for fashion. The certification density is higher, the supplier relationships more technical, and the compliance stakes more concrete — a missed expiry on an EN ISO certificate is not just a data problem, it is a liability.
What changes when certificates are managed in one place and what Image Wear is building toward
Image Wear chose Ovido to bring certificate management out of email threads and shared drives — and into a single, structured system. The transition changed three things in particular:
This change is evident in three main ways.
– Every certificate is linked to the product it belongs to. Not filed in a folder by date or supplier name — attached automatically to the relevant SKU, with expiry tracking live from day one.
– Renewals are no longer someone’s responsibility to remember. Automated alerts go to the right team members and directly to the relevant suppliers before the expiry date — not after.
– Supplier data collection is automated. Standardised compliance and ESG data requests go out through Ovido. Updated documents come back structured and linked. The manual chasing of suppliers with emails stops.
The result is a compliance record that is always current — not reconstructed before an audit, not dependent on who happens to be in the office that week.
The real cost of manual certificate management and compliance
Certification management in workwear is not a side task. It is a continuous, high-stakes process: tracking expiry dates across dozens of suppliers, chasing renewal documents, linking updated certificates to the right products, and making sure the right version is what gets shared with clients and auditors.
For a mid-size workwear brand doing this manually, the numbers add up quickly. Estimated at 750 to 1,400 hours per year — roughly €33,000 to €63,000 in internal staff time. Hours that belong to product managers and compliance leads, pulled away from the work that actually builds the business.
And that is before accounting for what happens when something slips through. A missed expiry on an EN ISO or hi-vis certificate is not just an inconvenience — it is a potential audit failure, a client liability, and a gap in the compliance. Every workwear brand with a multi-tier supplier base and a portfolio of certified products is facing the same structural challenge: the data needed for DPP compliance lives in too many places, in too many formats, maintained by too few people.
The question is not whether to prepare. The question is when — and what the cost of waiting looks like.
Ovido is built for exactly this transition: bringing supplier data, certificates, and compliance documentation into one place, automating the collection and tracking that currently consumes product team hours, and making the path to a published DPP a structured project rather than an open-ended scramble.
Built for what is coming
Image Wear did not start from zero. They started from where most brands are: with good products, solid supplier relationships, and a compliance infrastructure that was simply not built for the scale of what the EU is now asking for.
Ovido helped them take what already existed — the data, the documents, the supplier knowledge — and make it automated, traceable, and ready to become a DPP.
The certification is the same. The workwear is the same. What changes is the visibility — and the ability to prove it.
From certificate to passport.
Built for workwear.
Ready for what is coming.
Text: Ovido