Most Digital Product Passport guides — ours included, until now — spend their word count on what goes in the passport: materials, care, certifications. Almost none of them cover the boring, physical half of the job properly. How big does the code need to be? What do you print it on? Does it go on the product, the box, or both? Get this wrong and a beautifully filled-in passport sits behind a QR nobody can scan — or one that peels off before the product's first wash.
None of this is dramatic. It's mostly print-shop and packaging decisions any brand already makes for hangtags and care labels — the only thing that changes is that the code now has to keep working for as long as the product does, not just until checkout.
Two places it has to work
A passport needs to be reachable in two different moments, and each one has different rules of thumb.
- On the physical product — a customer holding the item, years after purchase, with nothing but a phone camera. This is the one ESPR is built around: a scannable data carrier on the product itself where that's practical, per the regulation's own provisions on the digital passport.
- On the webshop product page — a shopper deciding whether to buy, before the product physically exists in their hands. This one is about trust, not regulation, and it's the one most guides skip entirely.
How big, and where on the product
15 × 15 mm is the practical floor — about the size of a fingernail. Smaller than that and a phone camera starts struggling to autofocus at a normal scanning distance, especially in dim lighting or on a curved surface. There's no single number written into law yet; 15 mm is the size that actually works for a real customer standing in their kitchen, not a regulatory minimum.
On placement, the regulation's own logic is straightforward: the carrier belongs on the product itself where that's practical, with packaging or accompanying documentation as the fallback for items too small, too delicate, or too textured to print on directly. In order of how reliably a buyer actually finds it:
- Sewn-in care label (textiles) — already there for fibre content and wash symbols
- Hangtag — the most visible spot, but removable, so pair it with something more permanent for durable goods
- Underside, base or interior panel (furniture, hard goods)
- Inside the lid or packaging interior — last resort, since packaging usually doesn't survive as long as the product
What survives the product's life
This is the part that gets hand-waved in most guides. A QR that scans perfectly on day one but flakes off, fades, or tears within a year hasn't actually solved anything — and what material makes sense depends entirely on what the product is and how long it's meant to last.
None of this is a formal legal grading system — the delegated act for each product category will eventually set out durability expectations in more detail, and those aren't finalised yet for textiles or furniture. Until then, the honest rule of thumb is: match the label's durability to the product's own, not to the cheapest sticker in stock.
What's actually encoded in the code
A QR code is just a container — what matters is the URL inside it. Two options exist today:
- A plain product-page URL — e.g. productpasses.com/p/linen-overshirt-ss26. Works everywhere, resolves instantly, no setup required.
- A GS1 Digital Link URI — a web address that also carries a standard product identifier (typically a GTIN), so any GS1-compliant scanner or system reads the same code the same way.
European standards bodies working with the Commission-funded CIRPASS programme — which productpasses.com tracks as an observer — have recommended GS1 Digital Link-style URIs as the default carrier format for interoperability across DPP providers. It isn't a strict requirement for publishing a passport today, but it matters for one practical reason: a GTIN-based code isn't locked to one vendor.
That last point is worth sitting with. A code that resolves through a GTIN, rather than hard-coding one provider's domain into the printed label, can be repointed at a new resolver later without reprinting stock — the redirect changes, the sticker doesn't. For a product with a ten-year expected life, that's the difference between a QR that ages with the product and one that quietly becomes a dead link the day you switch software.
A short checklist before you print in bulk
- Confirm the passport is activated — a draft's QR scans to nothing.
- Print one sticker or sample first. Scan it yourself, at arm's length, in normal room light.
- Pick material and placement for the product's expected life, not the cheapest option on the shelf.
- Add a webshop link on the product page too — see the full placement guide for copy-paste snippets.
- Only then run the full batch.
If you're setting this up alongside a Shopify store, the QR step slots into the same workflow as connecting your catalogue — see our Shopify setup guide for the rest of it. For furniture and textile makers specifically, /furniture and /textiles cover the category-specific fields that pair with the physical label.
One honesty note, same as every section on a public passport: the page a customer lands on carries a self-declared disclaimer — we host and print, but we don't independently verify what's written on the page behind the code. Getting the physical label right is on the same footing as getting the content right. Both are the brand's job; we just try to make neither one harder than it needs to be.