Online platform Kinset was founded three years ago to assist businesses in the fashion industry with streamlining their sustainability data management.
Built around a connected product platform that centralises sustainability data, automates compliance reporting, and assists with the development of Digital Product Passports (DPPs), Kinset is the brainchild of Katie O’Riordan, whose experience in developing sustainable womenswear brand Theo+George helped influence the direction of her new company.
“My first foray into fashion was with the Burton Snowboards outerwear division in the US, where there were a number of sustainability programmes in place,” she says. “They obviously care about climate change – if there’s no snow, there’s no snowboarding.
“When I moved to Ireland, I decided to start my own sustainable fashion business [Theo+George] from scratch. I thought, if I start fresh and do everything right, of course it’ll be sustainable. But after 12 years of scaling the business, I realised I wasn’t able to prove it. I could say that we were using organic cotton, biodegradable materials, bio-based dye – but at the end of the day, I didn’t have the data to prove that what we were doing was more sustainable than anyone else.”
This frustration, and her first-hand experience of the fashion industry’s inconsistent definitions of sustainability, led her to team up with serial entrepreneur Alan Giles to establish Kinset in 2023.
Capturing data
The company focuses on capturing verified sustainability data across the supply chain, without relying on blockchain, emphasising simplicity and usability for all actors, including small suppliers or farms. The goal is to make data entry efficient and reliable, in order to support traceability, reporting, and accountability needs.
“Historically, once a company sold its product, it moved on to the next sale,” she says. “That’s how businesses have worked for decades. But now we’re seeing retailers coming back to brands saying, ‘Actually, we need more information. You need to share this with us.’ And that can take a huge amount of time.”
She cites the example of one client, a linen company, which, despite having all its data “very well organised,” is bombarded daily by companies requesting the same information – pulled from multiple different sources.
“So, it becomes a question of how to make that process more efficient,” she says. “How can you reduce the time it takes to gather that information and pass it up the chain?”
The business case
As sustainability and circularity goals vary from business to business, Kinset customises its solutions to each of its clients’ operations, commencing with an analysis of a firm’s biggest impacts and waste sources. By identifying efficiencies that can help to reduce costs and environmental impact, the platform helps to make circular initiatives financially attractive – reinforcing the business case for sustainability.
“There isn’t a set blueprint when it comes to product development,” says O’Riordan. “Every company I’ve worked with has had a different way of doing things.
“It comes down to asking yourself some key questions – what are your sustainability challenges? Where are your biggest impacts? Once you start analysing the data, it becomes clear where the impacts lie. Then the question is: can you make your supply chain more efficient and cost-effective, while also making it more sustainable?”
Digital Product Passports (DPP), which are set become a pre-requisite for companies in the EU fashion industry, can be a headache for businesses as they often involved a twin-track challenge – the physical application of QR codes to products and the management of data.
“Digital Product Passports are dynamic,” says O’Riordan. “Once you enter the information, you can update it, track provenance – see when it was changed, who changed it, and why, and so forth.
“But that information isn’t static. And product development cycles aren’t static either. You develop something, revise it, revise it again, and then move to production. If the passport is to follow that process, the information has to be able to change along the way.”
To support clients, Kinset operates ‘trust centres’ in each bespoke platform, which track regulatory readiness and data completeness.
“Being compliant is one thing, but from a data perspective, it’s another to know whether a €50,000 shipment could get held up at customs due to missing or incomplete data,” she adds. “That’s often the biggest challenge: how to capture all the necessary data, gain visibility into it, and ensure the information is complete for the products they need to ship.”
Harmonising the data
As regards the broader Digital Product Passport landscape, meanwhile, Kinset sits on all five working groups for CIRPASS-2, an EU pilot programme that brings together multiple DPP providers to standardise data, harmonise semantics, and guide regulation.
“We’re proud to be involved in CIRPASS-2,” says O’Riordan. “This isn’t something Europe is rolling out blindly. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes testing and research on what information to include and how to structure it. Semantics and data standardisation are massive issues, and will continue to be in the future, because all companies hold data differently.”
Kinset also works closely with GS1 and uses the GS1 DigitalLink standard to ensure interoperability across systems. O’Riordan notes that tech stacks in organisations are often siloed, with ERP, PLM, and PIM systems not communicating effectively.
“If the data is structured, you can use APIs to compare products,” she says. “For example, if two items share the same GTIN, you know they’re the same product and can pull the information together. But if there isn’t a single matching data point, an API won’t help you match the data. That’s why data semantics and standardisation are so critical.”
As regards scalability, meanwhile, given that Digital Product Passports are fast becoming a global requirement, Kinset is seeing increased demand for its services internationally.
“Anyone selling into Europe will be required to have a Digital Product Passport, so this is impacting global trade,” says O’Riordan. “We’re already seeing DPPs in use in China, and there are talks of rolling out similar systems in Vietnam. As such, we’re seeing growing global demand for our services.”
Learn more at www.kinset.com
