The co-founder and chief growth officer at TrusTrace in conversation with SGIE’s editor-in-chief on why he sees compliance data becoming shared infrastructure rather than one vendor’s product, and what that means for the brands building around his platform.
Hrishikesh Rajan, CGO at TrusTrace, keeps coming back to one number when he talks about what’s broken in supply chain compliance: 31 minutes. That’s how long it took a mid sized Danish fashion brand to go from creating an account to submitting a full human rights and environmental due diligence assessment on One Retail Hub, the platform TrusTrace built with Zalando and six other European retailers. One of the world’s largest sportswear brands, coordinating six people internally, did the same job in a few hours and sent it to five retailers at once.
Neither number is really about speed.
For Rajan, they’re evidence of something brands have known for years but rarely had proof of: that most compliance work isn’t compliance at all. It’s duplication: the same supplier answering the same question in a different format, for a different retailer, again. “That’s where the time saving actually comes from,” he says of One Retail Hub’s results.
“Weeks of duplicated work collapsed into something teams can finish in an afternoon, or less.”
A calendar that doesn’t leave much room
Ask Rajan which of the EU’s overlapping compliance deadlines is causing the most strain right now – EUDR, the Packaging Waste Regulation, CSRD transposition, the first Digital Product Passport delegated act – and he doesn’t hesitate:
“Right now, EUDR is creating the most immediate operational strain” .
It requires verified geolocation and supplier data down to the plot level for materials many brands, in his words, “have never fully traced.” Forced labor prevention rules aren’t far behind: under the Commission’s newer guidance, authorities can request supply chain maps and chain of custody documentation within 30 to 60 working days, and gaps in that documentation can be used against a company mid investigation.
What Rajan is describing isn’t a set of parallel problems so much as one problem wearing several regulatory names. “While their timelines differ, they’re converging around one requirement: trusted, product level supply chain data,” he says: a line that could sit above most of what TrusTrace has built since. His argument is that brands are starting to notice this convergence themselves, and are responding by building a single verified data foundation rather than solving each regulation separately.
“In this model, compliance becomes the outcome of trusted data, not a series of disconnected reporting exercises.”
It’s a tidy formulation. Whether it holds depends on the tier of supplier furthest from TrusTrace’s dashboards.
Where the strain actually lands
TrusTrace works with somewhere between 40,000 and 112,000 facilities, depending on how they’re counted – a range wide enough to suggest the counting itself is part of the problem. Gartner named the company a representative provider for Digital Product Passports in 2025, but the recognition sits above a well documented weak point: Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers, the mills, dye houses and spinners furthest from the brand relationship, are consistently the hardest to get onto machine readable, verifiable data.
Asked for the biggest failure or stalled rollout he’s encountered trying to get that tier compliant, Rajan doesn’t offer one. “It’s a pattern we see across the industry, even among some of the most sophisticated suppliers,” he says – a spinning mill in TrusTrace’s network spends roughly 150 hours a month on data collection and reporting, with three staff dedicated to paperwork and tens of thousands of dollars a year on overlapping certifications.
“The issue isn’t a lack of willingness to participate,” he says. “The supplier is responding to duplicate requests from every brand it works with.”
It’s a diagnosis that conveniently matches the product TrusTrace sells – reduce duplication and the tier becomes tractable – and Rajan doesn’t pretend there’s a harder, more specific failure behind it worth naming. Pressed on scale versus resource, he draws a similar line between large and small brands: “The regulations don’t really scale with company size,” he says.
A global sportswear brand and a much smaller apparel business are, in his telling, “ultimately being asked many of the same questions” about sourcing: the difference is that smaller brands have far fewer people to answer them, so
“every additional reporting requirement has a much bigger operational impact.”
Building for rules that aren’t finished yet
The DPP’s textile delegated act is still pending. CSRD’s scope has narrowed under the EU’s Omnibus package. Rajan’s answer to both is the same: build underneath the uncertainty rather than around it. “The textile rules aren’t final yet, so we’re not locking in fields that might change before they land,” he says. On CSRD, he argues the Omnibus narrowing doesn’t actually shrink TrusTrace’s workload, since the supplier data brands need for CSRD “overlaps heavily” with what EUDR, PPWR and forced labor prevention already require.
What he won’t claim is that TrusTrace can do this alone. “No single company can standardize supply chain data exchange on its own,” he says, pointing to One Retail Hub – built with Zalando, ASOS, Boozt, ABOUT YOU and four other retailers, alongside Cascale and Fair Wear – as proof that shared frameworks reduce duplication faster than any single vendor’s roadmap. It’s a notably humble admission from a company that has spent the past year collecting Gartner recognition, a retailer coalition and, as of April, a partnership with on demand merchandiser FYUL to extend the same model into sports and entertainment merchandise made for clients like CrossFit and Netflix.
“The brands ahead of this aren’t betting on how any one regulation ends up,” Rajan says. “They’ve built something that works no matter how it lands.”
It’s a bet of TrusTrace’s own making too: that the next 18 months of delegated acts arrive slowly enough for the data layer to be ready before the rules are.
