Open almost any customer-facing product page and the care and repair information, if it exists at all, is a wash-symbol row nobody reads and a warranty link nobody follows. It's usually the most skipped section on a brand's own website — and the one a customer actually goes looking for six months after the purchase, when something needs washing carefully or a button comes off. A Digital Product Passport gives that information one permanent, findable home. Here's how to write it so it's actually useful when someone opens it.
Care and repair are two different jobs
It helps to treat these as separate sub-sections rather than one blended paragraph, because they answer two different questions from two different moments in a product's life:
- Care answers "how do I keep this working and looking right?" — washing, drying, storage, cleaning products to avoid, how often to oil or re-wax, how to store it off-season.
- Repair answers "something's wrong — now what?" — spare parts, a repair contact, DIY fix instructions, or an honest statement that the product isn't designed to be repaired.
A customer with a stain on a jacket and a customer with a broken chair leg are not looking for the same information, and burying both under one heading means at least one of them won't find their answer.
It's also worth being honest with yourself about why most brands skip this. It's rarely a decision — it's that care and repair sit outside both the product photography workflow and the compliance checklist, so nobody owns writing them. A passport doesn't fix that on its own, but having one field clearly labelled "care" and another clearly labelled "repair" at least makes the gap visible, instead of letting it hide inside a generic "product details" paragraph.
Write care instructions like instructions, not a label
A care label's wash symbols exist to fit on a 2cm strip of fabric — they're not written to be read, they're written to be printed. A passport has room to actually explain, so use it:
If you already produce a fibre or care label, you have most of this — the passport version just gets to say the whole sentence instead of a symbol. Check your supplier spec sheet too; factories often hold more detailed care notes than what ends up printed on the label itself.
Give repair a real answer, even an honest limit
Repair information is where brands go quiet, usually because the honest answer feels underwhelming: "we don't currently offer repairs." That's a legitimate answer — far better than silence. What tends to actually help a customer:
- Who to contact. A real email or form, not a generic "get in touch" with no indication repair is even an option.
- What's realistically fixable. A loose seam, a replaceable zip pull or a re-glued joint are different from structural failure — say which kinds of damage you can help with.
- Spare parts, if any exist. Even "contact us for replacement hardware — we keep stock of the clasps used on this range" is useful and specific.
- The honest no. "This product is not designed to be disassembled or repaired; if it fails within the warranty period, contact us for a replacement" is a complete answer. It reads as confidence, not a gap.
What this looks like for different categories
Two live demo passports on productpasses.com show how little this needs to change in tone between a soft good and a hard good — both are short, specific, and tell the customer what will actually happen:
See either live at productpasses.com/p/linen-overshirt-ss26 or productpasses.com/p/oak-side-table-380. Notice what both skip: no generic "handle with care," no legal hedging. Each one names a method, a timeframe or a price, and the repair note commits to something the brand will actually do. If you'd rather see the full anatomy of a passport page first, our walkthrough of a live example goes section by section.
Why it's worth the half hour
None of this needs a project plan or a deadline to justify the time. A clear care and repair section earns its keep in ordinary, unglamorous ways: fewer "how do I wash this?" messages landing in your inbox or DMs, fewer returns from a customer who assumed dry-clean-only and machine-washed anyway, and a genuinely better answer the next time someone asks whether a product is built to last. None of that shows up on a compliance checklist, which is exactly why it's easy to skip — but it's the part of the passport most likely to get read by someone who already bought the thing.
It also compounds. A repair note that commits to something specific — free button replacement for two years, a flat-rate re-weld — turns into a thing customers mention in reviews and tell other people about. A vague "we stand behind our products" never does, because there's nothing concrete to repeat.
Where this fits with ESPR
No category-specific delegated act under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) has been adopted yet, so there's no finalised legal list of required care and repair fields to copy from. Based on the current Working Plan and the fields under discussion for textiles, this is the shape most guidance converges on: durability and reparability are named among the product parameters ESPR requirements can target, and care instructions and repairability information both appear on the expected field list — see our ESPR textile requirements guide for the fuller list.
That makes this section a reasonably safe bet either way: worth writing well for the customers reading it today, and lined up with where category rules are already heading if a mandatory field list lands on your category later.
Getting it written this week
A short process, not a project:
- Pull your current care label or supplier spec sheet — most of the care copy already exists somewhere.
- Write one honest sentence on repair: what's fixable, who to contact, or a clear no with a replacement policy.
- Split care and repair into separate parts of the section rather than one blended paragraph.
- Publish on one product first and read it back as a customer would, six months after buying it.
- Reuse the same two sentences across every product in a range that shares construction and materials — you don't need a unique essay per SKU, just an accurate one.