At the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, technology company Higg Co has unveiled its new Open Data Portal, introducing sustainability transparency to the apparel industry at a global scale. Expected to launch in 2021, the new portal, developed in partnership with the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), will feature access to the actual data behind social and environmental sustainability claims by global brands, retailers, and manufacturers on the Higg platform. For the first time, consumers, NGOs, regulators, and governments will be able to compare and validate claims by the apparel industry, including brands and retailers, and track progress. This summer, three SAC member brands and retailers, Zalando, H&M, and PVH, already tested consumer-facing Higg Index transparency with more than seven million global customers engaged.
The Open Data Portal aims to provide a gateway from sustainability claims on online product purchasing pages, advertisements, or other applications direct to source data, which is credible, comparable, and contextualized. Powered primarily by Higg Index data, which has been collecting facility, brand, and retailer data, and materials data for the past several years and shortly product level data, the Open Data Portal is designed to integrate with other data providers on the Higg platform to offer the most comprehensive publicly available picture of a product’s social and environmental sustainability performance.
