Ask "what does a Digital Product Passport actually look like" and most answers you'll find are diagrams — boxes labelled "materials", arrows to "end-of-life", a QR icon floating in the corner. Useful for a slide deck, not much help for deciding what to put in your own. So instead of another diagram, here's a real one: a live, public passport for a linen overshirt, open right now at productpasses.com/p/linen-overshirt-ss26. Open it in another tab if you want to follow along.
This isn't a mockup built for a screenshot. It's the same live page a customer lands on after scanning a QR code on the garment — same layout, same disclaimer, same anonymous scan counter running in the background.
A real example matters here because a Digital Product Passport lives or dies on specifics, and specifics are exactly what a generic spec-sheet diagram can't show you. "Materials section" tells you nothing about how much detail belongs in it. Seeing an actual named farm, an actual repair price and an actual certificate year does.
What loads first: the hero
Above everything else sits a short header: a product photo, where and when it was made ("Porto · 2026"), the product name as a large heading, a one-line subtitle ("SS26 · Natural undyed"), and a "Made by" line naming the brand and its city. No wall of text, no compliance jargon — a customer should be able to tell what the product is within about two seconds of the page loading.
Underneath that, three quick-fact tiles give the numbers a shopper actually skims for:
Three numbers, not ten. The temptation with a passport is to cram in every metric available; the tiles work because they don't.
The four sections a shopper actually opens
Below the hero, the page lists four tappable rows — this is the part that does the real work, and it's where most of the difference between a good passport and a thin one shows up.
- Materials & origin — not "linen and cotton", but three named components: an outer shell (94% linen, 220gsm, traced to a named family farm in Normandy), buttons (corozo nut, from a named co-op in Ecuador), and thread (cotton, OEKO-TEX 100, from a named mill in Lithuania). Percentage, material and origin, per component.
- Care & repair — plain washing instructions written the way you'd actually say them ("wash at 30°C on a gentle cycle, or just air it — linen freshens fast outdoors"), plus a genuine repair offer: free seam and button repairs for two years, then at cost, with spare buttons shipped free on request.
- End-of-life — what happens to the product when it's actually worn out: industrial composting, since the shell, thread and buttons are all plant-based, plus a brand take-back option that turns old shirts into cleaning cloths.
- Certifications — GOTS and OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100, each named with its scheme and the year it was certified or tested, not just a badge image.
What's easy to miss: the disclaimer and the scan counter
Near the bottom of every public passport — including this demo — sits a small, deliberately unglamorous notice: the information is self-declared by the brand, and productpasses.com doesn't check or verify it. Right below that, a one-line privacy note explains that an anonymous scan (country, device class, timestamp — no IP address, fingerprint, or cookie) is counted on the page.
Neither of these is decoration. The disclaimer is honest about what a hosted passport can and can't promise: we supply the structure, the hosting and the QR — the brand remains the party responsible for what's written on the page. Nothing on the page is labelled "ESPR-compliant"; the closest wording you'll see is "ESPR-aligned", which describes the template's structure, not a legal sign-off.
Two more examples, if you're not making shirts
The overshirt is the most-linked demo, but it isn't the only live one. Two more show how the same four-section structure carries over to a completely different category of product:
- /p/wool-throw-oat — a single-fibre wool throw. One material line instead of three (100% undyed lambswool, traced to one flock in Portugal's Serra da Estrela), and a repair section built around what actually happens to a throw: snags pull back through with a crochet hook, holes get re-woven for the cost of the yarn.
- /p/oak-side-table-380 — a solid oak side table. The materials section lists the timber's FSC chain-of-custody number and the plant-oil finish separately; care is a once-a-year hardwax refresh rather than a wash instruction; end-of-life leans on the fact that solid oak with no synthetic finish can be refinished, resold or passed on for decades before disposal even comes up.
Same four sections both times — Materials & origin, Care & repair, End-of-life, Certifications — but the content inside them is shaped entirely by what the product actually is. That's the part worth copying, more than any specific wording.
How this maps onto what ESPR actually asks for
The delegated acts that will fix the exact required fields per product category haven't landed yet for textiles or furniture — that detail is still being worked out. But the shape of what those acts are expected to cover is already visible in ESPR's own framework: materials, durability, reparability, and end-of-life handling, among others. The four-section structure above lines up with that shape on purpose, so a passport built today doesn't need reshaping once a category's rules are finalised — only its field-level detail will need filling out further.
A category-specific breakdown of what's expected for textiles specifically — the fields, not just the section headings — is in our ESPR textile requirements guide. For furniture makers building the equivalent, /furniture covers the category-specific fields for that template.
What to check before you copy this structure
- Name the actual source for each material line — a farm, a mill, a supplier — not a category ("natural fibres").
- Write care instructions the way you'd say them out loud, not the way a label legally has to.
- Make the repair offer concrete: a price, a time window, or both — "contact us for repairs" tells a shopper nothing.
- State end-of-life honestly, including if it's just "general waste for now" — a vague claim is worse than an honest gap.
- Enter certifications with scheme name and year, not just a logo — see our GOTS/OEKO-TEX field guide for exactly what belongs there.
If you're setting this up alongside a Shopify catalogue, our Shopify setup guide covers importing products into drafts before you fill in sections like the ones above; once it's live, the QR placement guide covers getting a customer from the product to this page in the first place.