Ask any small brand a few months into Digital Product Passport prep what's actually slowing them down, and the answer is almost never "the software". It's the same thing every time: getting accurate material composition, origin and certification data out of suppliers who are busy running their own factories and don't especially want to fill in your spreadsheet. This is a practical guide to that part — no regulation citations, no deadlines, just what actually gets a supplier to send you a usable answer.
Why this is the part that eats the calendar
Filling in a passport template yourself takes minutes once you have the data. Getting the data is the slow step, and it's slow for boring, structural reasons: your contact at the supplier is often sales, not the person who actually knows the fibre percentages; the information exists somewhere in their systems but nobody has been asked to pull it together in your format before; and a vague request ("can you send your product info?") reliably produces a vague reply. None of that is fixable with better software — it's fixable with a better request.
Start with what you already have
Before you email anyone, check what's already sitting in your own paperwork. Most brands are closer to a first draft than they think:
- ✓Fibre content or care labels. If your product already carries one, the composition breakdown printed on it is a legitimate starting point for your passport's materials section.
- ✓Purchase-order specification sheets. Many POs already list the intended material mix, even if nobody has treated that sheet as "compliance data" before.
- ✓Certificates you've collected for other reasons. OEKO-TEX, GOTS, GRS and similar certificates you gathered for retail buyers or marketing purposes usually contain composition and origin details you can reuse directly.
- ✓Old email threads. A surprising amount of composition data has already been sent to you at some point, just never filed anywhere searchable.
Doing this first pass yourself, product by product, means you go to suppliers with specific gaps to fill rather than a blank request — which changes the kind of reply you get.
Write a request a busy factory will actually answer
The single biggest lever is who you ask and how specifically you ask it. A general "please send your product compliance info" email to a sales inbox tends to sit unanswered, or comes back with a glossy brochure instead of a data table. A short, specific request to the right person performs much better:
- ✓Address it to quality or compliance, not sales. If you don't have that contact, ask your sales rep directly: "who handles material composition and certification requests on your side?" It's a normal question and usually gets a name fast.
- ✓Ask for their existing document, not a new one. Request their bill of materials or CMT (cut-make-trim) specification sheet — something they almost certainly already have — rather than asking them to fill in your form from scratch.
- ✓Name the exact fields. "Material breakdown by percentage, country of origin, and any current OEKO-TEX or GOTS certificate" gets a far more complete reply than "your product info".
- ✓Give a real deadline. Two weeks, not "whenever you get a chance" — vague timing produces vague prioritisation on their end too.
Let suppliers fill in their own fields
Relaying data through email — supplier sends you a PDF, you copy-paste it into your passport tool — is where errors creep in and where the back-and-forth multiplies. If your supplier is willing to enter data directly, that's almost always faster and more accurate for both sides.
On productpasses.com this is a built-in flow: invite a supplier as a Contributor on a specific passport, choose which fields they should fill (materials, care, end of life, certifications — whatever you actually need from them), and they get a link to a scoped editor showing only those fields, nothing else about your workspace. Their submission goes into a review queue; you approve it before anything goes live, so you're not handing over your public passport, just the data entry.
Turn a messy spreadsheet into structured records
If your product data already lives in a spreadsheet — the shape most small brands actually have, cobbled together from years of supplier emails — you don't need to retype it. On Studio and Foundry plans, bulk import takes a CSV export and uses AI to clean up and map inconsistent column names and formats into structured passport fields, which you then review before anything is published. The same two plans can instead connect a Shopify store directly — every product comes in as a draft automatically — materials, care and certification fields still need filling in, since Shopify has no native fields for those, but you skip re-creating every product from scratch.
Make it a habit, not a project
The brands that don't end up scrambling are the ones who quietly made this part of ordering, not a separate compliance push. A composition and origin request added to every new purchase order — one line in an email you were sending anyway — costs almost nothing at the time it's sent. Reconstructing the same information two years later, product by product, after the fact, is the expensive version of the same task. If you only do one thing after reading this, make it that: start asking for the data at the moment you place the order, on everything new, starting now.