Confirming product authenticity is critical for the luxury and resale markets as they grow in the digital realm — particularly as online fraud is on the rise. A new partnership between product cloud solution Evrythng and digital certification company Arianee aims to increase the traceability of product and streamline authentication processes for brands.
The Evrythng Product Cloud has always offered a digital identity protocol, which helps brands track their products from production to final sale. However, through this new partnership, Evrythng users will be able to access Arianee certification for each and every item, which confers an additional layer of digital credentials through the use of blockchain technology. For luxury and sneaker brands, in particular, this could be a valuable tool to convert skeptical consumers.
“As the premium apparel and luxury resale markets continue to grow and counterfeit culture persists, the ability to verify quickly and easily that a product is authentic is becoming a necessity for any premium brand,” said Niall Murphy, CEO and co-founder of Evrythng. “To date, the lack of item-level traceability of products through the supply chain has posed a serious challenge.”
In practice, each manufactured product is registered and tagged with an Active Digital Identity at the point of production. Evrythng customers can then access real-time data at every point in the product journey, through the Product Cloud. Brands can then transfer the identification to new owners (the customers) at the point of purchase and provide instant authentication in the process. This identification would then also be available for any future resale.
Blockchain has received substantial attention in the industry for its potential to provide a permanent, trustworthy way to record information, but many companies have not yet introduced it into their own business operations. The Arianee integration is the latest addition to the Evrythng Blockchain Integration Hub, which enables users to trial and deploy cost-effective blockchain technologies that suit their particular needs.
“By combining product digitization with blockchain technology, brands achieve end-to-end visibility into every product’s journey while forging a direct and respectful link with consumers through virtual certificates of authenticity,” said Pierre Nicolas Hurstel, CEO and founder of Arianee.
Murphy believes that this added layer of traceability at each stage of the supply chain will not only increase transparency for brands, but also assist in the sustainability efforts of those companies. To that end, Everything has also recently launched an upcycling program with R Collection and Levi’s.
“Traceability of every item is critical to achieving sustainability,” said Murphy. “A major barrier to recycling or reselling is lack of information about the materials making up an item, for example, making it hard to sort or reuse. This is one of the reasons why such a high proportion of apparel items cannot be recycled — and where strong authentication of item information helps tremendously.”
