who is liable for the product passport in the case of private label products

What you must do concretely

What is expected of you

With private label, your company name appears on the packaging or product label, but the product itself is made elsewhere — often by a manufacturer who also supplies that same product under other brands. For the digital product passport, this arrangement makes a material difference, because the ESPR links the obligations not to who physically manufactures the product, but to who places it on the market under their own name.

You are designated as a manufacturer

Article 27 of the ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) places manufacturer obligations on the person who has a product manufactured under their own name or brand and places it on the market. If you have a product manufactured by a production company and put your own brand on it, you fall under this definition — even if you have never seen the factory and did not draw up the technical specifications yourself. For a company with 10 to 100 employees, this means that responsibility for the digital product passport, technical documentation and conformity does not automatically remain with the factory, even if that may feel like the case from a day-to-day perspective. If you have any doubt about your own position, you can use the question Am I an importer or manufacturer according to the ESPR? as a starting point.

You are responsible for the content of the passport

Article 9 of the ESPR describes what a digital product passport must contain and that the data in it must be accurate and up to date. As a brand owner in private label, you usually do not yourself determine the material composition, the origin of components or test results — that data comes from the factory. Yet it is your name that is linked to the product, and thus your name that is linked to the passport. Practically speaking, this means that a company selling private label products must make agreements with the factory about which data is supplied and checked by whom, rather than assuming that "the factory will handle that".

You must be able to demonstrate where the data comes from

A digital product passport is not just a collection of data, it is also an account. With private label, this is more pronounced than with products that a company designs and manufactures itself, because the distance between brand name and production knowledge is greater. For a mid-sized company, this means there must be a trail — a contract, a specification sheet, a test report — showing that the data in the passport did not come out of thin air but comes from an identifiable source.

Where things go wrong in practice

A recurring pattern is that the purchase contract with the factory does regulate the price, delivery time and quality requirements, but says nothing about who supplies the data for the product passport. Once the passport has to be created, no one feels responsible for the accuracy of the content.

A second situation: the private label company sells the same base product in a few variants (different colour, different packaging, different accessory), but the factory supplies the same technical data for all variants, while the composition is actually different. No one checks whether the passport is correct per variant.

A third, often underestimated problem: the factory is located outside the EU and supplies data in a format or language that does not match what the passport requires. The private label company processes the data without substantively verifying it, because its own staff do not have the technical background to do so. For those working with a factory outside the EU, background on the division of roles that arises in this context can be found at My manufacturer is located outside the EU — who arranges the digital product passport then?

A fourth situation arises when a private label company itself operates multiple brands for different sales channels (own webshop, marketplace, wholesale) and links a different passport or no passport per channel to the same underlying product. Selling via a marketplace brings with it its own layer of obligations, which can be found at What does the digital product passport mean if I sell products via an online marketplace?

A fifth, less visible problem: if it later emerges that data in the passport was incorrect, there is discussion about who should have flagged it — the factory that supplied the data, or the brand that published it. This question is elaborated at who is liable if the product passport contains incorrect information

What you can document

• A supplier agreement with a specific provision on the product passport: who supplies which data, in which format, and at what time before placing on the market.
• A delivery specification per product group or product variant, so that the factory knows which data per variant are needed and does not use one set of data for all variants.
• A receipt and control moment whereby the supplied data are checked internally before they enter the passport, with a designated name or function that performs this check.
• A file per product with the underlying documents (test reports, material declarations, certificates) that support the data in the passport, so that these documents are available not only at the factory but also at the brand itself.
• An agreement on changes: what happens if the factory adjusts a composition, component or process, and who then ensures that the passport is updated.
• Clarity on the division of roles in case of complaints or questions from supervisory authorities, recorded between brand and factory, so that it does not only become apparent at an incident that no one felt responsible.

For companies that carry both private label and own design or own brand, the distinction between the different roles is sometimes difficult to maintain clearly. The question I sell products under my own brand — what obligations do I incur? provides an additional starting point for this, and the broader question of who in the chain is actually considered the responsible party is described at Who is responsible for the product passport for products?