Project ThreadTrace

Indian textile exporters face a hard deadline. By 2027, the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) will require a Digital Product Passport (DPP) on every garment sold in Europe. Simultaneously, the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG) and CBAM are imposing fines and carbon taxes on non-compliant imports.

Without a machine-readable, auditable chain of custody from cotton farm to finished garment, shipments from Tirupur (a €3 billion export cluster) face customs rejection, contract cancellations, and a potential 20% cost disadvantage.

A Pugh matrix evaluation rejected manual certification (too slow, high fraud risk) and off-the-shelf software (too expensive, assumes high connectivity). The strategic choice was to build ThreadTrace: a lightweight, offline-first SaaS platform designed specifically for the Indian textile shop floor.

• 4-Tier Data Schema: Farm, Spinning, Knitting, and Garment Assembly.
• Mass-Balance Verification: An automated anti-fraud engine ensuring shipped garment weight cannot exceed certified raw material received.
• Offline-First UI: Icon-based interface allowing factory workers wearing industrial gloves to log data even without internet.

Every QR code generated by ThreadTrace contains an encrypted digital fingerprint of the product's certificates. If an exporter attempts to alter underlying data (e.g. changing a failed chemical test to "Passed"), the fingerprint instantly breaks, alerting EU customs automatically.

Woven QR labels (€0.02) were chosen over NFC tags (€0.25) to ensure financial viability while surviving 60°C industrial washing.