Calvin Huelsman, sustainability manager at Elevate Textiles, wants to make the case for a “data bill of rights.”

Speaking for the North Carolina manufacturer at Textile Exchange’s annual conference in Vancouver earlier this month, Huelsman said a foundational framework governing how data is handled across the supply chain would make the process fairer, more secure and more streamlined.

Such information isn’t free, yet brands often demand extensive data from suppliers without paying for the effort required to collect it, Huelsman said. Companies should also have ownership rights over their own data, so it can’t be extracted from or forced out of them unethically. Another sticking point: making data sharing easy.

“I want to drive home that every moment that we spend filling out the same data point is a moment that we can’t spend working towards our material targets, towards our carbon and water targets,” he said. “I think the biggest issue for us when entering this data into separate traceability platforms is that there isn’t any interconnectedness between them. What we enter into X traceability platform is not able to be input into Y, and that really presents a problem.”

For years, digital tracking has been held up as a way to bring real-world operations into focus, fostering direct engagement and trust between global retailers and deep-tier suppliers while meeting regulatory demands, building consumer confidence, preventing fraud and driving better performance.

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