--- title: A Bulgarian jeweller puts Digital Product Passports on its pieces description: How Vantony, a Bulgarian fine-jewellery brand, became a TracePass design partner — putting provenance and materials data on every piece, before any mandate. canonical: "https://www.tracepass.eu/resources/vantony-jewellery-dpp-pilot" locale: en source: "https://www.tracepass.eu/resources/vantony-jewellery-dpp-pilot" --- # A Bulgarian jeweller puts Digital Product Passports on its pieces > How Vantony, a Bulgarian fine-jewellery brand, became a TracePass design partner — putting provenance and materials data on every piece, before any mandate. Jewellery isn't on any Digital Product Passport deadline. There's no delegated act compelling a ring or a pendant to carry a DPP the way the EU Battery Regulation compels a battery pack from February 2027. So when Vantony — a Bulgarian fine-jewellery brand — became one of TracePass's first design partners, it wasn't to beat a regulator. It was because a passport on every piece does something jewellery has always wanted to do anyway: prove what the thing is made of, where it came from, and how to care for it — to the person holding it, in their own language, by scanning a code. 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. ## FAQ ### Is a Digital Product Passport mandatory for jewellery? No. Jewellery has no ESPR delegated act yet, so a jewellery DPP is currently voluntary. REACH (lead, cadmium, nickel release), conflict-mineral and hallmarking rules still apply to jewellery regardless of the DPP timeline. ### What does a jewellery passport show? Metal type and fineness, stone type, origin and whether it's natural or treated, weights, any hallmark or certification, ethical-sourcing status where known, and care instructions — all accessible by scanning a QR code on the piece. ### Why would a brand adopt a DPP before it's required? Provenance and authenticity are already part of how fine jewellery is sold. A passport makes that verifiable and shareable, and early adopters build the trust narrative before it becomes an expectation.