Consumer Innovation Shout Out: Digital DNA for your Shirt

How old is this shirt? Should I just throw it in the trash? What is really in this?

These are questions that you may or may not ask yourself every spring cleaning. Yet, besides donating your clothes, there really isn’t much value in your clothing once you’ve moved onto the next fashion trend – one of the high costs of fast fashion.

However, Natasha Franck, with her company EON, wants to bring the fashion industry full circle to achieve sustainable fashion and innovation. EON Holdings, a startup dedicated to creating a sustainable fashion ecosystem, partnered with Microsoft tools to launch its project, CONNECTED FASHION, merging garments, RFID thread and IoT.

RFID thread has been used in some capacity for anti-theft and counterfeiting, and IOT has been predominantly used for all things supply chain. But CONNECTED FASHION merges both, creating an IOT framework that will enable end-to-end connectivity at every point of a garment’s ‘sustainable’ life cycle.

Clothes will be woven with an RFID thread, creating a Digital-ID. The RFID in the garment will connect with the cloud, which stores relevant data, such as which materials the garment is made of, where it was made, and more.

So, what if you had the ability to know exactly what life span your shirt had left? What if the designer had ability to know if the shirt ended up in a landfill, or you knew if it made itself a new home? What if you knew the best way to recycle it?

Digital-ID can provide answers to these questions and more. This new technology is essential for sustainable lifecycle management, creating transparency, performance analytics, and product utilization metrics to help consumers and producers create a circular economy for clothing.

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