Everyone pictures the same scene: someone stops at the shelf, takes out a phone, scans the QR code and decides whether to buy the T-shirt. That picture isn't false — it is simply the rarest and least important use of a digital product passport. The real readers arrive at other moments, with different questions, and usually years after the sale. Once you see that, you fill in different fields first than the ones marketing would ask for.
Six readers, six different moments
A product passport does not address one audience but six. And more importantly: they do not open it at the same time.
| Who reads it | When | What they look for |
|---|---|---|
| Your B2B customer | Before you even sell to them | Whether you have a passport at all, and whether it meets their supplier requirement |
| Customs and market surveillance | At import, or at any time | Whether the product has an accessible, credible passport |
| The shopper | At the moment of purchase | Composition, origin, care — the public layer |
| The repairer | 2–8 years later | Disassembly guide, spare-part availability, screw sizes |
| The refurbisher | 3–10 years later | Everything — because they take on legal responsibility for the product and its passport |
| The recycler | 5–15 years later | Exact composition and hazardous substances — so they can sort it |
Look at the right-hand column. The shopper is the only one for whom the surface is enough. The other five need technical data — the kind you would never put on a product page.
The timeline that turns everything around
Every other asset you create about your product — the photo, the description, the label — peaks at launch and then slowly fades. The product passport behaves the other way round: the most valuable reads happen after you have sold the product. In fact, after the buyer has grown tired of it and let it go.
That makes the DPP a strange genre. It is not a campaign asset; it is closer to building documentation — it becomes valuable when someone wants to touch what you built years later. For a T-shirt, that "someone" is a Portuguese textile recycling plant wanting to know whether the 5% elastane can be separated from the 95% cotton.
This has a very practical consequence: the passport must outlive your webshop. The product page disappears when the model is discontinued. The passport has to keep working long after you stopped selling it — which is what the provider switching and lock-in question is about.
And some will not read it — they will write to it
So far we have spoken of them as readers. The reality is sharper: some of the later actors modify the passport.
- The independent repair shop writes to it. Reading the disassembly guide is not enough — it wants to document what it replaced, at the level of that individual unit.
- The refurbisher takes over responsibility. They read it, update it, and thereby become legally responsible for the product and its passport. From then on it is theirs.
- The recycler switches it off. The final operation is deactivating the passport — the product has ceased to exist, and its passport must reflect that.
This is not speculation: the EU-funded CIRPASS project's consensus user stories describe the roles exactly this way (DPP User Stories V2.0, CC BY 4.0).
The practical consequence is uncomfortable, which is why it is worth facing early: the passport is not a publication you finalise once. It is a living record that must accept entries years after manufacture — from people you do not employ.
This is why access levels exist — not out of secrecy
If there are six different readers, clearly not all of them may see the same thing. A recycler needs the exact material ratios; your competitor has no business with them. An authority needs to see the supply chain; that is not the shopper's job.
This is precisely why the ESPR does not prescribe an "everything for everyone" data sheet but layered access: the same QR code opens different depths depending on who reads it. Three typical levels:
- Public — for the shopper: material, origin, care, end-of-life handling.
- Legitimate-interest party — for repairers, recyclers, business partners: technical detail, disassembly, exact composition.
- Authority — for market surveillance and customs: the full picture, including the supply chain.
This is not a restriction but protection: without it, compliance would mean publishing your recipe on the internet. In detail: DPP and trade secrets.
What does this change for you?
Four very concrete consequences.
1. You don't start with the nice copy. The temptation is to fill in the brand story and the sustainability message first, because that is a familiar genre. But the fields worth the most in a passport are the ones a repairer or a recycler looks for — and those are exactly the ones most often left empty. The anatomy of a product passport goes through what each field is worth.
2. You are not the source of the data. Half of what the repairer and the recycler need is not with you but at the spinning mill, the dye house, your supplier. You cannot invent it — you have to request it, and this is typically the longest lead-time task in the whole preparation.
3. The language is not your language. If your most important reader is a Portuguese recycler or a German customs officer, the passport has to speak their language. This isn't translation in the usual sense: field names are standardised and can be rendered automatically — your job is to make sure your free-text fields (care, disassembly, end-of-life) exist in several languages too.
4. It's not the number of scans that matters, but their source. If you only watch the count, you will conclude "few people read it" — and draw the wrong lesson. The useful question is where they come from: the shop, the repair centre or a recycling yard. Scan analytics breaks exactly that down.
So the shopper doesn't matter?
They do — just not in the way you would first assume. A shopper will not scan the code to read the carbon footprint. They will scan it because they lost the care label, because they want it repaired, or because they want to resell it and prove it is genuine.
All three situations happen after the purchase. So the shopper belongs to the "later readers" too — they just don't know it.
What to do now
- Ask your B2B customers whether they are already requesting product data. Today they are typically the first who would actually read a passport.
- Fill in the technical fields first — composition, origin, disassembly, end-of-life — and only then the marketing-style ones.
- Start the supplier data request, because it takes the longest.
- Think through the access levels: what is public, and what is only for a legitimate-interest party.
If you are still at the basics, start here: what is a digital product passport, then the preparation checklist.
How does Veridyn help?
Veridyn's schemas pre-classify fields into access levels — public, legitimate-interest party, authority — so you don't have to decide field by field what may go out. The same QR code shows different depths, and you grant the authority level via a token link, with field-level precision.
Labels render in all 24 EU languages, so the Portuguese recycler reads the field names in their own language. We break scans down by source so you can see who actually reads them, and from where. See it live, or start free — the first passport takes minutes.