From compliance to connection: building meaningful experiences around Digital Product Passports

 

Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are coming. But what if we can elevate them beyond compliance to become the one-on-one connection with your customers?

 

Apr 22, 2025

Mandated by the European Union as part of the wider Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), the goal of DPPs is to enhance circularity, traceability and transparency across physical value chains. But this isn’t just about regulation. More opinionated, value-driven customers are asking harder questions – about provenance, transparent pricing, environmentally conscious supply chains, and clear service management. They’re factoring authenticity, ethics and craftmanship into their buying decisions. Trust is the new baseline for engagement – and DPPs can help you earn it.

But treating DPPs as just another compliance box to tick is to overlook their transformative potential. These aren’t just records in a database or on a blockchain. Think of them as CRM for your products. And, just as CRM has evolved from basic lead management into real-time CX, DPPs underpin the shift from linear consumption towards more circular models of repair, reuse, and recycle of products. As such, they can become living product interfaces and emotional touchpoints: the carrier of a new kind of story to tell, connect people with the journeys behind the things they buy.  

 
At their core, DPPs are standardized, digital records that follow a physical product throughout its lifecycle. They contain data about origin, materials, transport, repairability, environmental impact, and ownership. While regulators may enforce them as a currency to foster circularity and accountability, we see them as the next evolution of product-driven digital experience design. DPPs can add a persistent yet responsive, intelligent digital layer to products. They’re not only about what a product is, but also how it came to be, how it’s used, and what it could become.

Of course, that data has to be trustworthy. To ensure data remains traceable throughout a products’ lifecycle, DPPs must be tamper-proof. But reliable raw data alone doesn’t build trust. Charging them with accessible, resonating narratives does. That’s why designing DPPs for humans is as important as designing them for systems. 

 
We believe that when we supercharge this persistent product data with AI and on-brand service design, DPPs can become not just passive records, but active allies. And, seamlessly embedded into your digital fabric, they open the door to lifecycle-aware personalization.  

AI can use passport data to shape content-rich onboarding and suggest relevant offers for care and support. Tuned to care, not just calculate, they can anticipate need states and invoke a contextual conversation around the most meaningful interface you have with your customers: your products. Predicting wear and tear. Nudging users to repair instead of replace. Suggesting local recycling or supporting resale, when tapped into a wider ecosystem of connected services. Useful, highly personal experiences, tailored to a user’s and your product’s context.  
DPPs can take your product journeys and intertwine them with your customers’ and, in doing so, build and nurture a sustainable relationship with your brand that lives well beyond the initial purchase. 

Persistence, transparency, empathy and AI together can create this emotional durability – a sense that something is worth keeping, sharing, or passing on. Rooted in both empathy and intelligence, we see the future of product experience not as transactional, but relational. Not static, but adaptive. Not clinical, but soulful. 

DPPs will become required. But they don’t have to be boring. Designed well, they can transform how we relate to the things we buy, use, and eventually let go. The Digital Product Passport is just the beginning. Let’s build meaningful, personal experiences that care.