What a Head of Sustainability costs you
£6,500+ a month
- 1 × Head of Sustainability salary
- Employer's NI contributions
- Pension contributions
- Software subscriptions
- Recruiter fees
- Holidays and sick days
- Three months' notice to leave
Product compliance platform and advisory for fashion
Product compliance intelligence for fashion.
One digital product identity for every product. Every compliance regulation and all green claims checked and verified.
ESPR, EmpCo green claims, PPWR, packaging EPR, the UK Plastic Packaging Tax and Digital Product Passports — handled as market access and supply-chain resilience, not a reporting exercise.
Our Digital Product Passport code was accepted by the EU registry on the day it opened — 20 July 2026.
Free check: enter your website and see how many of your products carry green claims wording that may not conform to UK law.
No sign-up needed to see your headline counts.
For retailers and marketplaces: screen incoming brand ranges against 50+ regulations before you sign the PO.
For brands: we retrieve the missing supplier data and document the social accounting behind your tiers.
05Nov 2026
Inaugural conference · Free to attend
What do your clothes really cost?
5 November · 9:30–13:00 Porton Science Park, Salisbury
The category
Product compliance is a decision about a product, not a report about a company.
Sustainability for fashion is product compliance. It means knowing what each garment is made of, where it comes from, and what you can prove.
What product compliance intelligence is
A garment is either legal to sell in a market or it is not. That turns on what it is made of, where it came from, what is printed on the label and the product page, and what you can prove when someone asks. The decision attaches to the SKU, and it is made again for every market the product enters.
What product compliance intelligence is not
It is not ESG reporting, which describes the company. It is not a factory audit, which describes the site. Both feed it. Neither answers whether this dress can be listed in Germany next season.
What compliance intelligence means
The three things that decide it are held together and kept current: the rules in each market, the evidence you hold, and the product record they attach to. The output is a status per product, per market — cleared, action needed or blocked — and the file behind it.
What we do
Product Relationship Management
The easiest way to think of it: Product · Regulations · Markets. For every product you sell, we connect what it is, what the law demands, and where you sell it — so nothing you put in front of a customer is left unproven.
Product
Every SKU, feed, claim and care label
Regulations
ESPR, EmpCo, UFLPA, packaging EPR
Markets
UK, EU, US and everywhere you sell
Pre-PO screening with Symolem-ID
Check hundreds of SKUs against 50+ regulations in seconds, before you sign the PO or clear customs. See blocked lines, unproven claims and missing test certificates before stock is made or shipped.
Evidence retrieval across Tier 1–3
Software portals stall in fashion because spinning mills and dye houses do not log into client dashboards. Our specialists chase and verify lab tests, transaction certificates and fibre origins directly from source factories.
Audit-ready human-rights due diligence
Worker welfare, wage verification and grievance data compiled into auditable evidence packs that satisfy EU CSDDD, German LkSG and US forced-labour enforcement, not generic policy PDFs.
Symolem-ID
One product compliance record. Every obligation. Every retailer.
Symolem-ID is product compliance intelligence software for fashion. It holds the evidence behind each product, checks that record against the markets where it is sold and gives every party in the chain the same verified answer.
Market access, country by country
See whether a product is cleared, blocked or cannot yet be determined in each market — with the missing evidence and its owner named.
- Blocked
- CAP active
- Cleared
Compliance rules attached to products
ESPR, EmpCo, EPR and packaging obligations are mapped to the products and jurisdictions they affect, then re-checked as the rules change.
Evidence behind every EmpCo green claim
Certificates, test reports, supplier attestations and passport data sit against the product, so a buyer or regulator can follow a claim back to its source.
Inspection record · ESPR
Every product inspected against 50+ regulations.
Symolem prepares your product data and audits your evidence against global requirements, starting with the EU ESPR. Fibre composition, certificates, named Tier 1 and Tier 2 sites and every green claim, checked and owned before they go anywhere near a label.
- 50+regulations checked
- Secondsper product
- 1Verification ID
Whichever Digital Product Passport provider you choose, the passport is only as good as the audited data behind it. The textile delegated act sets which fields must be carried and who is accountable for each one. We make sure your suppliers can answer for them. Start with our ESPR Digital Product Passport checklist.
What the inspection checks
Select a data group to see the kind of entries we inspect and verify against the evidence.
inspection record · Product identity
- GTIN 05012345678900 · GS1 Digital Link
- Model: Wide-leg denim, style DN-402
- Batch 2026-07-WK29 · EU registry identity verified
- Economic operator: brand legal entity and EORI
Market access depends on the product, not just the company.
We track the rules so your product and sourcing teams don't have to.
Regime 02
Great Britain
No ESPR equivalent yet, but the CMA can act directly on misleading environmental claims under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.
Regime 03
United States
No federal regime — obligations are set state by state, including California's SB 707 textile EPR, the FTC Green Guides, and Proposition 65 chemical disclosure.
Regime 04
EEA / EFTA
Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein take EU acts through the EEA Joint Committee on a different timetable; Switzerland is EFTA but not EEA.
standards foundation
Built on the UN/CEFACT UN Transparency Protocol.
Symolem holds a seat on the UN/CEFACT working group developing the UN Transparency Protocol (UNTP), the open standard for verifiable product and sustainability data, and contributed to its public review.
Working Group
UNTP
The people behind the record
Fashion compliance is not a badge on a product page. It is proof across Tier 1–3.
A single garment involves fibre origins, spinning mills, wet-processing chemistry, blended yarns, trims and packaging weights, often across four countries. Software alone cannot verify that chain. Our specialists chase the evidence at source, so your product records survive a statutory audit.
Design & Buying
Regulatory scope and data gaps, flagged before you order
Before you sample, we check which styles fall in scope of ESPR, EPR, the UK Plastic Packaging Tax and green-claims rules in each market — and which supplier data you do not yet have.
Sourcing & Production
Regulations data retrieval across Tier 1–3
Fibre origin, transaction certificates, chemical test files and composition chased directly out of your suppliers, so the label matches what is in the product and can survive a check.
Ethics & Governance
Social accounting that stands up to audit
Worker welfare, fair pay and human-rights due diligence documented into an auditable file that answers CSDDD, LkSG and US forced-labour rules — not a policy PDF.
The hidden cost of hiring
Expand your capacity without the headaches of hiring.
Your E&S department with Symolem
£2,000 a month
- 1 × senior Environmental and Social lead
- Symolem's consultant bench behind them
- Weekly regulation monitoring
- No software subscriptions
- No recruiter fees
- Pause or stop with 30 days' notice
~70% saving
Illustrative monthly comparison. Employment costs vary by salary, benefits and recruitment terms.
Environmental and Social, on demand
We build your Environmental and Social department. You keep it.
Many fashion brands under £50m have no one whose job this is. A senior lead from Symolem takes the role, builds the function, and hands it over working.
For brands and retailers with no in-house sustainability lead, or one person who needs senior cover.
£2,000 a month. Three-month minimum, then rolling.
What your lead does
- Owns your environmental and social strategy, targets and roadmap
- Reads the regulations affecting your products and tells you what applies: ESPR, EmpCo, green claims, EU and UK due diligence
- Handles supplier conversations, retailer and investor questionnaires, board questions
- Reviews marketing and product claims before they go out
- Sends a quarterly E&S report you can hand to a board or a buyer
- Builds the policies, supplier code and reporting cadence so the department outlasts the engagement
20 minutes on your products and the rules that apply to them
Led by Lavinia Fernandes, a UN/CEFACT UNTP Supply Chain Working Group member.
See the embedded manager deliverables →When you need more than a department
From range review to compliance evidence.
In four steps.
Some obligations need a project, not a person. Four scoped pieces of work, each with a fixed output and a clear end.
Each step has a fixed output and a clear end. Stop at any one of them, or keep the consultant until the obligation is current.
01
Regulatory exposure audit
Every style checked against ESPR scope, EPR registration, green-claims rules and UK packaging obligations, market by market, with the dates each one stops being sellable.
02
Regulations data retrieval
The missing evidence chased directly out of Tier 1–3 suppliers: fibre origin, transaction certificates, chemical test files, composition and packaging weights. Collected once, structured, and linked to the products it belongs to.
03
Social accounting and human-rights due diligence
Worker welfare, fair pay and labour evidence documented across your supply chain into an auditable social file that answers CSDDD, LkSG and US forced-labour requirements.
04
The verified proof pack
One audit-ready record per product, with expiry dates, named owners and a runbook your sourcing team can run. It clears retail onboarding, customs queries and feeds whichever DPP provider you choose.
Scoped against range size, number of markets and supplier count. Consultancy engagement: 3, 6 or 12 months. Fixed output at every step.
Where it goes wrong
Four ESPR questions a buyer, a marketer or an auditor will ask before you are ready.
For retailers and marketplaces
The pre-PO compliance firewall for fashion retailers
Under EU ESPR, EmpCo and the UK DMCC, retailers share liability for the third-party brands they list. Symolem-ID screens a brand's line sheet in seconds and gives buying and legal teams a status per SKU before intake: cleared, blocked or missing evidence, with the gap named.
For fashion brands and manufacturers
Tier 1–3 evidence retrieval and audit-ready social accounting
Stockists and customs are asking for proof you do not have on file. We chase your suppliers for the missing lab tests and transaction certificates, and tie every green claim to its evidence, so wholesale orders are not delayed and claims hold up under EmpCo and the UK DMCC.
For brands already on a traceability platform
We have traceability data. Why isn't it a passport?
Tier maps and audit PDFs are not a Digital Product Passport and do not tell you whether a silk blend clears AGEC, PPWR or the textile delegated act. We take the outputs you already hold, map them to the passport fields and the rules, and audit the record, then hand one Verification ID to whichever DPP provider you choose, with the proof pack.
For sustainability leads and their buyers
An ESPR finding came back red. What now?
A red flag with no remediation path is a stock dropout, a withdrawn claim or a blocked listing. We investigate the supplier data gap, run the social accounting and corrective action plan with the supplier, and upload the verified resolution back into the platform that raised it.
Plain English
The ESPR and EmpCo questions we get asked most
Short answers, no jargon. If yours is not here, ask us directly and we will answer it the same way.
Let's talk about your market access.
Whether you are working out what stopped on 27 September, which suppliers can evidence what they claim, or who carries the obligation on an FOB order — start with your own claims, or 20 minutes with us.