A Bulgarian jeweller puts Digital Product Passports on its pieces

This is the story of that pilot: what a jewellery passport actually carries, why a brand would adopt one before it's required, and what we learned wiring a real catalogue through the platform.

Who Vantony is

Vantony is a fine-jewellery brand based in Sofia, Bulgaria, working largely in sterling silver (925) and gold set with natural stones — sapphire, amber, agate, tiger's eye and others. It's the kind of brand whose customers already care about authenticity and provenance: where a stone came from, whether it's natural or treated, how to look after it. That's exactly the buyer a Digital Product Passport speaks to, which made Vantony a natural first jewellery pilot.

Why jewellery, when there's no mandate

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR — Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) is the umbrella that brings Digital Product Passports to category after category. Jewellery has no delegated act yet, so a jewellery DPP today is voluntary — there's no deadline forcing it.

But “no DPP mandate” doesn't mean “no rules.” The horizontal regulations already apply to jewellery regardless:

• REACH restricts lead and cadmium content and nickel release in items in prolonged contact with skin.
• Conflict-mineral and Kimberley-Process expectations bear on the stones.
• Hallmarking / assay rules apply to precious metals.

So the data a passport would carry is data a serious jewellery brand should be able to stand behind anyway. The DPP just makes it legible — to a customer, a retailer, or a regulator — through one QR code.

And for a brand, the upside is the story. A scannable passport turns “trust us” into “scan it and see”: metal and fineness, stone type and origin, natural-versus-treated, care instructions, and — where the data exists — ethical-sourcing status. Every sale becomes a provenance story the customer can carry in their pocket and share. The brands that adopt this early own that narrative before it's table stakes.

What a jewellery passport carries

A jewellery DPP on TracePass is built from the platform's jewellery template — a structured field set covering:

• Identity — product name, category, unique per-item identifier.
• Materials — primary metal and fineness (e.g. silver 925), additional metals, metal weight.
• Stones — type, colour, cut, clarity, carat weight, country of origin, and whether natural or treated.
• Provenance & ethics — conflict-free and Kimberley-Process status, mine or region where known, any chain-of-custody or responsible-sourcing certification.
• Compliance — REACH indicators (lead, cadmium, nickel release), any test report.
• Hallmark / assay — presence, authority and number where applicable.
• Care & circularity — care and cleaning instructions, repair / resize / take-back options, recyclability.

Not every field is filled for every piece — and that's deliberate. Jewellery supply-chain data, especially a stone's precise origin, is genuinely hard to pin down. TracePass runs an “AI suggests, a human approves” model, and a field left honestly blank (or flagged as unverified) is treated as the correct answer when the brand can't yet stand behind a value. A passport that's transparent about what it doesn't know is worth more than one that fabricates provenance.

How the pilot worked

Vantony's catalogue was brought into the platform as draft products and passports — no AI extraction spend, just structured imports. Manufacturer-identifying details prefilled automatically; the material and stone facts that only the brand truly knows are filled by the brand. Each piece resolves at a GS1 Digital Link URL keyed on a per-item serial, and the public passport renders in any of 24 EU languages from a single source entry — a Bulgarian shopper and a German one scan the same QR and each read it in their own language.

One honest detail worth stating plainly, because it's the kind of thing a sharp buyer notices: Vantony isn't a GS1 member, so the passports use a GS1 test-pattern product code in the identifier slot, with the real uniqueness carried by the per-item serial. That keeps the Digital Link URL well-formed and resolvable without inventing a registered code that belongs to someone else. It's the right call for a pilot, and we'd rather explain it than paper over it.

What this pilot is — and isn't

Vantony is a design partner, not a paying customer — the arrangement is a barter, and the point of it is mutual: Vantony gets passports on its pieces ahead of the curve, and TracePass gets a real-world jewellery catalogue to harden the product against. Calling it anything grander would be overselling, and overselling is the opposite of what a provenance platform should do.

Jewellery doesn't have to wait for a mandate to benefit from a Digital Product Passport. The brands that put verifiable provenance, materials and care data behind a QR code now are the ones that own the trust story when their customers — and eventually the regulators — come asking. Vantony is one of the first to do it.