How much did that yoga tracksuit cost? Just check the bill. But how much did it cost the environment? TrusTrace has the precise answer. Last month, the company—founded by techies Saravanan Parisutham, Madhava Venkatesh, Shameek Ghosh, and Hrishikesh Rajan—that launched in 2016, finally got the world’s first real-time traceability programme going at scale for two of the world’s largest brands in apparel and sporting goods.
Ethical consumers concerned about whether this sports bra was made by child labour in Vietnam, or the yarn for that leggings came from an endangered forest in Brazil, can now simply scan the QR code to get their entire lifecycle information on mobile phones. Where it was made, what the manufacturing conditions are, the amount of emissions—unscrupulous manufacturers cannot hide any more.
People are inspired to change the world when tragedy strikes close to home. “I’m from an agricultural family in Coimbatore. Our groundwater was getting contaminated by local pollutants which was affecting our produce. We were also pained to see the rivers in which we swam becoming infection-carrying bodies or worse, turning into dry walkways. I had to return to India from the UK—where I was living at the time—to sort things out. My friends and I had been discussing projects that married technology with sustainability and that is how we started TrusTrace,” says the 35-year-old Parisutham.
The moral fashion platform works by collecting data on products, which is then made accessible to its customers. The information helps them identify the right suppliers. “Suppliers enter the data on the platform with attached certificates or business documents as evidence. Our engineers extract the data to verify the suppliers’ version,” Parisutham explains. Since the eco-transformation in the fashion industry is a challenge, TrusTrace’s team acknowledges that no single solution provider or company can achieve it on their own. The system collects data for more than one million transactions.
“Our grassroots local initiative has transformed into a global traceability platform. We realised that fundamental change in fashion must be global, spanning the entire supply chain with all the stakeholders doing their part,” shares Parisutham. The TrusTrace team acknowledges that no single solution provider or company can do it on its own. “We must work together and share knowledge and innovation as an industry to succeed,” says Parisutham.
This is fur real.