Product compliance for fashion and textiles
Keep selling your products in every market you trade in.
We find the product data you are missing, put it in order, and get it ready for the checks buyers and regulators now run.
That means ESPR, EmpCo, Extended Producer Responsibility and Digital Product Passports — arriving market by market.
Who we've worked with
Who this is for
Three jobs, three starting points. Pick the one that describes you.
You own the product
You decide the materials, the factory and the spec, so the passport, the claims and the evidence behind them are yours to produce. We map what each market asks of your products and get the data in order before a buyer or an authority asks for it.
You put it in front of the customer
You may not have made the product, but you are the one selling it, so you carry the risk of a claim you cannot support. We check what your suppliers actually send you, and give you a way to test it before it reaches your listing.
You host other people's products
Marketplaces and platforms are being pulled into the same rules as the sellers on them. We help you set what you require at onboarding, and how you verify it at scale rather than one listing at a time.
The rules now apply to each product, not your annual report.
Sustainability used to be a company-level job: annual reports, targets and ratings. Now the obligation sits on individual products — what they are made of, where they come from, and what claims you can prove.
That means you can lose market access product by product. If you buy FOB, you are the importer — and the regulator will hold you responsible, not your supplier or agent. Most of the evidence you need is in someone else's factory.
Your access to each market depends on the product, not just the company.
We track the rules so your product and sourcing teams don't have to.
Great Britain
No ESPR equivalent yet, but the CMA can act directly on misleading environmental claims under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.
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.
EEA / EFTA
Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein take EU acts through the EEA Joint Committee on a different timetable; Switzerland is EFTA but not EEA.
Check which markets your products can still enter
A five-minute, no-cost check of your EU, GB, EEA and US exposure.
How we work
From assessment to evidence.
In three stages.
Every engagement follows the same sequence. You find out where you stand, we close the gaps, and you end with evidence you can produce on demand.
Each stage has a fixed output and a clear end, and you can stop at any of them. The mix of skills is matched to what your position actually needs.
Establish the position
We determine what you can place on each market and from what date that changes. Product range mapped against ESPR wave scope, claims tested against EmpCo, EPR registration status confirmed in every market of sale, and purchasing terms reviewed to establish who the economic operator is. You end this stage knowing exactly what is at risk, by product and by date. Some businesses stop here and act on it themselves.
Close the gaps
Registrations filed and overdue returns closed. Claims withdrawn or substantiated before trim and label orders commit. Supplier data requests built and issued into tier 1 and, where the obligation requires it, tier 2. Passport data model defined for the categories that need one first. This is the stage where the work is done rather than described, and it is sequenced against your critical path rather than the regulation's calendar.
Hold the evidence
One repository holding certificates, test reports, declarations, attestations and filing history, with expiry tracking and a named owner against every obligation. Governance defined, sign-off route agreed, and the whole thing handed to your team with a runbook and training. What you keep is the ability to answer a regulator, a retailer or an auditor without starting from scratch.
Each stage has a fixed scope and a defined output. Engagements are scoped against range size, number of markets and supplier count.
Plain English
The 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 where you can sell.
Whether you are working out what stops in September, which of your suppliers can evidence what they claim, or who carries the obligation on an FOB order. A 30-minute conversation is the place to start.
Specialist capability, for as long as the obligation needs it.
Where fashion businesses do buy this capability, they increasingly buy it fixed-term. Six months. Twelve months. The brief is consistent: bring the obligations current, build the processes, train the team, leave. Businesses are not trying to build a permanent function. They are trying to acquire capability and keep it.
There is a reason the market has settled there. Compliance requirements do not arrive at a steady rate or in a single discipline. A brand facing EmpCo needs claims substantiation and trim specification. The same brand a year later needs supplier data collection across Tier 2. A year after that, EPR filings in four jurisdictions and a US state registration nobody had heard of. No single hire covers that range. We resource it the way the problem behaves: a named consultant with the specialism the current obligation needs, for as long as it needs them, and a different specialism when the obligation changes. The bench carries the range so your headcount doesn't have to.
No Compliance Team?
Common in businesses under £50m and in most emerging brands. The obligations apply in full regardless of size. Symolem operates as the function: registrations, evidence, claims and filings run externally, with your product team briefed rather than burdened.
The most common position in heritage and mid-market brands. Your team knows the supply base and can get answers out of it. What is missing is the reading, which regulation applies to which product, in which market, from which date. Symolem supplies the interpretation and the structure; your team supplies the relationships.
One person carrying UK, EU and US across every product category. Capable, and structurally unable to cover it. Symolem takes defined workstreams, a market, a filing cycle, a data collection programme, so the internal lead keeps ownership without carrying the whole surface.
How we work
Advisory, backed by a working platform
Market access, obligation mapping, and readiness for ESPR, EmpCo and UK requirements, delivered as a sourcing discipline, not a sustainability project.
Symolem is the consultancy. Symolem-ID is the product verification platform underneath it. Most advisers stop at the recommendation. Ours is tested against a platform that issues Digital Product Passports and holds the verified supplier records behind them.
Answer once. Not forty times.
For fashion and textile suppliers serving UK and EU brands. Every customer asks for the same information in a different format, on a different deadline. We manage incoming customer data and supplier due-diligence requests on your behalf, structure what you already hold, and prepare your facility for verified credential status.
£300 per month, per facility
As many customers as ask. As many requests as they send.
Our system
Product compliance, delivered in five layers.
START is the structure. These are the layers we deliver against it. The obligations attach to products, so the work happens where products are made and bought, in bills of materials, supplier files, trim specifications and purchasing terms. We work across all five layers because a market access position fails at whichever one is missing.
Standards: Which rules apply, and to what
We establish which of your products are in scope of what, in which market, and from which date. ESPR wave scope by category, EmpCo claim rules against what is printed on your tickets and labels, EPR registration status in each market of sale, and the purchasing terms that determine whether you or your supplier is the economic operator. The output is a position, not a score.
Transparency: Digital product identity
We define which products to passport first, what data each one requires, and where in your supply base that data does not yet exist. We sequence Digital Product Passport rollout against your product range and your critical path, and where you already work with a provider we verify their output against the regulation rather than taking it on trust.
Accountability: Evidence that survives scrutiny
Product-level footprint calculation, claim substantiation, and the supplier evidence behind both. Certificates, test reports, declarations and attestations held in one place with expiry tracking and named owners. Measured and documented, not estimated, because the standard is what a regulator or a retailer's onboarding team will accept, not what reads well in a report.
Responsibility: Sourcing, due diligence and who carries the obligation
Multi-tier supplier mapping and due diligence under EUDR, LkSG and CSDDD, and the first mile work that makes the rest possible: getting fibre origin, processing location and material composition out of the tiers where nobody currently has visibility. Alongside it, we advise governments and national programmes on Digital Product Passport and Extended Producer Responsibility design, which is how we know where the regimes are going before they arrive.
Transition: Capability that stays with you
Training, process design and handover, so the obligations are run by your product and sourcing teams rather than by us indefinitely. Runbooks, templates, supplier request cadences and the governance that makes ownership explicit. A compliance function nobody inside the business can operate is not a compliance function.
Symolem-ID
Introducing Symolem-ID - AI-Native product compliance verification platform - launching soon
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.