Skip to content

Who carries the Digital Product Passport obligation?

In the general case the manufacturer carries it, and in the textile case nobody carries it yet, because the act that would create the duty has not been adopted. The useful question in the meantime is which role you occupy, because the framework attaches duties to roles rather than to companies.

Sources as at
26 August 2026
On this page

The short answer

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation attaches passport duties to the economic operator placing the product on the EU market. For most apparel brands that is the manufacturer, and the word manufacturer here has almost nothing to do with owning a factory.

For textiles specifically there is no duty yet. The framework exists. The textile delegated act that would say what a textile passport must carry has not been adopted, so there is nothing today for a textile brand to be non-compliant with. What is worth doing now is establishing which role you occupy, because the role decides everything that follows and it does not change when the act arrives.

Two warnings before the detail. This is our reading of primary law rather than legal advice, and where we have not reviewed a provision directly against the Official Journal we say so on the source list rather than borrowing confidence from a secondary summary. The source list at the foot of this page is the honest measure of how far to trust any sentence above it.

Placing on the market is not making available

These two phrases look like synonyms. They are the load-bearing distinction in EU product law.

Placing on the market is the first making available of a product on the Union market. Making available is any supply for distribution, consumption or use in the course of a commercial activity. The first happens once per product. The second happens every time it changes hands.

Our paraphrase of Regulation (EU) 2019/1020, Art. 3, not a quotation from it. In force. Definitions reviewed.

The consequence is that duties attaching to placing on the market land on one actor rather than on everyone in the chain. A retailer selling a garment somebody else imported is making it available. It did not place it.

The roles, and which one you are probably in

The framework recognises a small set of economic operator roles, and one company can occupy more than one of them at once for different products.

Roles as EU product law uses them, with the part that most often surprises people.
RoleWhat it isThe part people get wrong
Manufacturer Whoever manufactures a product, or has one designed or manufactured, and markets it under their own name or trade mark. An own-brand fashion label that has never been near a sewing machine is usually the manufacturer in law. The cut, make and trim supplier that physically made the garment usually is not.
Importer An operator established in the Union that places a product from a third country on the Union market. The role requires establishment in the Union, so a company established outside it is not the importer of its own goods into the EU, whoever pays the freight. Somebody established inside the Union occupies that role instead.
Authorised representative An operator in the Union appointed in writing to act on a manufacturer's behalf for specified tasks. Appointment is a written act with a defined scope. It is not a courier arrangement or a friendly distributor.
Distributor An operator in the chain, other than the manufacturer or the importer, making a product available. Distributors carry real duties. They do not carry the manufacturer's duties.
Fulfilment service provider An operator offering warehousing, packaging, addressing or dispatch without owning the goods. The role exists so that goods sold into the EU by a seller outside it still have somebody reachable inside it.

One more actor is worth knowing about and it comes from product safety rather than from ecodesign. The General Product Safety Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/988, applies without any declaration of conformity and identifies a responsible person established in the Union at its Article 16. We record the provision. We do not model the role, and nothing in the passport should be read as our assessment of who that person is for a given product.

Selling online into the EU

An online offer counts as placing goods on the EU market when the offer is aimed at the EU. That is a test about intention shown through evidence rather than a test about whether a customer in Brussels can reach your checkout.

The signals that carry weight are the ones you chose: the dispatch areas you set, the languages you publish in, the currency you price in, the payment methods you accept and the domain you sell from. The signal that carries very little on its own is that the site loads in a browser somewhere in the Union. Every site does.

The same logic runs inside our own engine, in the other direction. A shop's shipping settings are never treated as evidence that it sells into a market, because ships is not sells and inferring a market from a postage table would attach duties to a business on the strength of a configuration screen.

Is there an exemption if you are small?

We have not found one, and our reading of the framework is that its approach to small and micro enterprises is support rather than exemption.

Three provisions carry that: guidance and support measures at Article 22, the circumstances of small enterprises as an input into when requirements start to apply under Article 4(4), and a carve-out at Article 25(1). On that reading a brand of three people selling into the EU sits in the same place as a brand of three thousand, with more help available and the same obligations.

How far to trust that

The three articles are named rather than quoted, because none of them has been read verbatim against the Official Journal by us. The direction is consistent across everything we have reviewed. The wording of any particular provision is not something to take from this page, and anybody relying on it for a decision should read the articles themselves.

The burden that in practice falls hardest on a small brand is not a passport duty at all. It is producer registration for extended producer responsibility, which is live in some markets today, is unrelated to whether a passport exists, and costs roughly the same per market whatever the volume behind it.

What is not settled

Four things, kept visible rather than tidied away.

Northern Ireland and the wider EEA

We have not settled how our own applicability logic should treat either. The consequence is deliberate. Where the position is undecided the duty stays live rather than switching off, so nobody is told a duty does not reach them on the strength of a question we have not answered.

Who counts as a supplier of an article for substance notifications

Whether a brand owner that never physically handles goods is the supplier of an article under REACH is not obvious from the text. We treat it as carrying the duty and we label that as our reading. It matters for the SCIP reference field and nowhere else on the passport.

Whether ordinary apparel needs a declaration of conformity

Our reading is that it does not, and we have not had that reading tested by anybody else. Declarations belong to specific regimes such as personal protective equipment, medical devices, toys and electrical equipment. Ordinary clothing falls outside all of them. That is our reading of the instruments rather than a statement any of them makes, and it is the reason there is no public register of textile test reports to consult.

What the textile act will say about actors

Unknown, because it does not exist. Any page telling you today which actor carries a textile passport duty is describing the framework and calling it the product rules.

Proving who you are, which is harder than it sounds

A passport names the operator carrying it. Corroborating that name against a public register works very differently depending on the Member State, and the unevenness is invisible until somebody tries.

The EU VAT number validation service discloses different amounts per Member State. A French number comes back with the company name attached. A German or a Spanish number comes back valid with the name and address rendered as dashes. A British number cannot be checked through it at all since the United Kingdom left, which we record as not checkable rather than as a failed check, because those are different findings.

Customs identifiers are harder still. Disclosure is consent based in both the EU and the UK, so no route binds a customs identifier to a company without the company agreeing to it. An engine that assumed otherwise would resolve identity in France and go quiet in Germany without ever reporting that it had.

None of that changes who carries the duty. It changes what anybody can prove about it from the outside.

When any of this starts

This page carries no date, and the omission is deliberate. Adoption, entry into force, application and any transition period are four different things, and the page that answers who is the wrong place to blur them.

The status page is the only page here that states dates, row by row, with what is in force kept separate from what has been adopted and from what has only been signalled.

What a textile passport actually is The object itself, what it connects to and which parts of it are settled today. What your catalogue can already answer Once the duty question is settled, the next one is where the values are going to come from.

Sources

Everything here rests on primary law. Where a provision has been reviewed in full we say so, and where an article has been confirmed without that review we say that instead. The distinction is not a formality on this page, because this is the one a reader is most likely to act on.