Bain Says Digital Product Passports Could Double Product Lifetime Value. Most Brands Aren't Paying Attention.

A landmark report from Bain & Company and eBay reveals that the EU's Digital Product Passport mandate isn't just a compliance headache — it could double what a product is worth over its lifetime. Yet 90% of brands still treat it as a regulatory burden. Here's what they're missing.

In June 2025, Bain & Company and eBay published a report that should have sent shockwaves through every product company's strategy team. The headline finding: Digital Product Passports — the digital identity records that the EU is making mandatory for most physical products — could double a product's lifetime value.

Not improve it. Not incrementally increase it. Double it.

A £500 fashion item, the report illustrates, could generate an additional £500 in resale revenue and post-purchase services when supported by a DPP. And up to 65% of that new value flows directly to consumers — through easier resale, better pricing transparency, and verifiable product information that builds the trust needed to buy and sell secondhand with confidence.

The report arrives at a moment of maximum cognitive dissonance. Brands are about to be required by law to implement Digital Product Passports — batteries by February 2027, textiles shortly after, electronics and dozens more categories by 2030. The infrastructure investment is coming regardless. And yet, Bain found that 90% of brands surveyed still view DPPs as nothing more than a compliance burden.

That's not a miscalculation. It's a strategic blind spot. And the brands that see through it first will have a compounding advantage that competitors will spend years trying to close.

What the Report Actually Found

The Bain × eBay report makes a deceptively simple argument: a product's economic life doesn't end at the first sale, and the digital infrastructure required for DPP compliance is the same infrastructure needed to capture value from everything that happens after.

The math works like this. When a consumer buys a fashion item today — say, a £500 jacket — the brand captures revenue exactly once. The product might be worn for years, repaired, resold, gifted, resold again, or eventually recycled. Every one of those events generates economic activity. But the brand is invisible for all of it. No data, no relationship, no revenue.

A Digital Product Passport changes that equation. By attaching a verified digital identity to the product — accessible via QR code and carrying information about materials, provenance, authenticity, care instructions, and ownership history — the DPP creates a persistent digital thread that follows the product through its entire life.

Bain identifies three categories of new value that thread unlocks.

Post-purchase services. With a digital connection to the customer, brands can offer warranty and maintenance reminders, extended service plans, tailored aftercare, cleaning services, and exclusive offers. These are high-margin, low-cost touchpoints that deepen the customer relationship and generate recurring revenue from a product that was previously a one-time transaction.

Resale and circularity. DPPs enable brands to launch resale, trade-in, and buyback schemes with confidence. When a product carries a verified digital identity, the authentication problem that plagues the secondhand market — "Is this real? Is it in the condition described? Is it stolen?" — largely disappears. The friction that currently prevents millions of products from entering resale channels is removed. And when those products do resell, the brand can participate in the transaction rather than being cut out of it.

Customer intelligence. As products change hands, DPPs give brands visibility into previously hidden behaviors within secondary markets. They help brands uncover resale trends, engage with customers who didn't buy directly from the brand, and create opportunities to build loyalty and drive upsell over time — even with secondhand buyers.

The combined effect is transformative. A single transaction turns into ongoing revenue. A one-time customer becomes a long-term relationship. And a product that previously disappeared from the brand's view the moment it left the store becomes a persistent, data-generating, revenue-producing asset.

The £500 Jacket: A Concrete Example

Let's make this tangible.

Under the current model, a brand sells a £500 jacket. That's it. Revenue captured: £500. The customer takes it home, wears it for two years, and eventually donates it or lists it on a third-party resale platform. The brand earns nothing from the resale. It has no idea who bought it secondhand. It can't offer the new owner care instructions, warranty service, or compatible accessories. The product has economic life remaining, but the brand is completely disconnected from it.

Now imagine the same jacket with a Digital Product Passport. The customer scans the QR code at home, registers the product, and receives tailored care instructions that extend its lifespan. Six months in, a notification suggests professional cleaning — the brand takes a referral fee or offers the service directly. At the one-year mark, the brand offers an extended care plan. When the customer decides to sell, they use the DPP's one-click resale feature — the product's authenticity, condition history, and care records are instantly available to buyers, commanding a higher resale price. The brand facilitates the resale (taking a commission), welcomes the new owner into its ecosystem, and begins the post-purchase cycle again.

Bain's estimate: that second lifecycle — the services, the resale, the re-engagement — can generate value equivalent to the original purchase price. £500 becomes £1,000 in total lifetime value.

And the consumer captures up to 65% of the gains — through higher resale prices (authenticated products command premiums), better care that extends product life, and reduced friction in selling. This isn't a zero-sum game between brand and customer. Both win.

The Resale Market Is Already Massive — And DPPs Accelerate It

The Bain report doesn't exist in a vacuum. It lands in the context of a secondhand market that is already booming.

The global secondhand apparel market was worth $230 billion in 2024, growing at a rate that outpaced the broader retail clothing market by five times. Online resale specifically grew 23% in 2024 — its strongest growth since 2021 — and is projected to nearly double to $40 billion by 2029.

Consumer behavior has shifted permanently. A record 58% of consumers purchased secondhand apparel in 2024. Among Gen Z and Millennials, nearly half of total apparel spending is now planned for secondhand. This isn't a niche behavior — it's a mainstream market shift.

But the secondhand market has a trust problem. Counterfeits, misrepresented condition, uncertain provenance, and cumbersome listing processes all create friction that suppresses what would otherwise be even larger resale volumes. A 2025 Certilogo survey found that 56% of consumers rank product authentication as their top priority when considering a secondhand purchase — ahead of price, condition, and brand reputation.

Digital Product Passports solve this directly. A product with a verified digital identity — carrying authenticated provenance, material composition, and ownership history — removes the guesswork from resale. Buyers trust verified products. Sellers achieve higher prices. And the transactions happen faster, with less friction, on more platforms.

DPPs don't just participate in the resale market. They accelerate it.

Why 90% of Brands Are Getting This Wrong

The most striking finding in the Bain report isn't the doubling of lifetime value. It's that 90% of brands view DPPs purely as a compliance burden.

This isn't just a missed opportunity — it's a strategic misunderstanding of what a DPP actually is.

When most brands think "Digital Product Passport," they think "another regulatory requirement." They mentally file it alongside CE marking, REACH compliance, and import documentation — something the compliance team handles, the legal team reviews, and the finance team budgets for reluctantly. The goal is to do the minimum required by the deadline and move on.

That framing misses the fundamental nature of what a DPP creates: a persistent digital connection between the brand and the customer, anchored to a specific physical product. That connection didn't exist before. In most cases, once a physical product leaves the point of sale, the brand has no way to reach the customer, no data on how the product is being used, and no channel through which to provide value or generate revenue.

The DPP changes that. The QR code on the product isn't just a regulatory data carrier — it's a direct channel to a customer who has already demonstrated purchase intent, product interest, and engagement. It's a channel that works in-store, at home, and at the moment of resale. It's a channel that survives changes of ownership.

Brands that understand this will design their DPP as a customer experience — not a data dump. They'll use it to deliver genuine post-purchase value: setup guides, maintenance advice, warranty service, personalized offers, and seamless resale. And in doing so, they'll earn the recurring revenue and customer intelligence that Bain's research quantifies.

Brands that don't will build a compliance-minimum DPP — a raw data file behind a QR code that nobody scans twice — and then wonder why their competitors are capturing value they're not.

Real Brands, Real Examples

The early movers are already demonstrating what a value-oriented DPP looks like.

Chanel is replacing physical authenticity cards with digital passports, accessible through a scannable metal plate embedded in its bags. The move simultaneously solves authentication for the secondhand market — where Chanel bags command five-figure resale prices — and creates a persistent digital touchpoint with every owner, current and future.

Dior provided digital product passports for its B33 Sneaker collection, giving customers access to authenticity certificates, production journey insights, exclusive gifts, and collection updates — turning a product label into an ongoing brand relationship.

Breitling launched DPPs for its watches that connect customers to the brand's digital warranty program, allowing them to initiate and track repair processes directly through the passport. The watch's QR code doesn't just prove authenticity — it provides functional, ongoing service value.

Loro Piana, in collaboration with the Aura Blockchain Consortium, embedded digital certificates of authenticity and traceability in its products, allowing customers to scan QR codes on tags to learn the full production story.

These aren't experiments. They're operating systems for a new kind of brand-customer relationship — one that extends far beyond the point of sale and generates value at every stage of the product's life.

The Implications Beyond Fashion

The Bain × eBay report focuses on fashion, but the logic extends to virtually every physical product category.

Consider consumer electronics. The average household owns dozens of connected and unconnected devices — each with warranty information, setup requirements, firmware updates, compatible accessories, and eventual recycling needs. Today, that information is scattered across paper manuals, email inboxes, and manufacturer websites that are often hard to navigate. A DPP that consolidates all of it into a single, scannable digital hub doesn't just satisfy regulatory requirements — it fundamentally improves the ownership experience.

Consider home appliances. A washing machine with a DPP could provide personalized maintenance schedules, order replacement parts with a tap, connect the owner to warranty service, and eventually guide proper recycling. Every one of those interactions is a touchpoint where the brand can provide value and, where appropriate, generate revenue.

Consider furniture. A sofa with a DPP could carry material composition and sourcing data (satisfying sustainability-conscious consumers and EU regulators), care instructions tailored to the specific fabric, and a resale pathway that connects the current owner to a buyer when it's time to upgrade.

The pattern is the same across categories: the DPP creates a digital connection that didn't previously exist, and that connection is a platform for post-purchase value — support, services, resale, data, and revenue — that extends far beyond the initial transaction.

What Smart Brands Should Do Now

If the Bain report teaches one lesson, it's this: brands that treat DPP as a compliance checkbox will spend money and get compliance. Brands that treat DPP as a customer experience platform will spend the same money and get compliance plus revenue plus data plus loyalty.

The strategic playbook is clear.

Start before you have to. The brands in the Bain report that are generating value from DPPs didn't wait for enforcement dates. They recognized early that the same infrastructure required for compliance could be designed to deliver customer value — and that designing it right from the start is far cheaper than retrofitting a compliance-minimum system later.

Design for the customer, not the regulator. The EU specifies what data a DPP must contain. It doesn't specify how that data is presented or what additional value surrounds it. The difference between a DPP that nobody scans and a DPP that customers actively use is design, content, and utility. Make the DPP page genuinely useful — setup guidance, troubleshooting, care tips, warranty access — and customers will engage with it. Make it a raw data dump and they won't.

Think in lifecycles, not transactions. The doubling of lifetime value that Bain identifies comes from capturing value across the entire product lifecycle — not just the first sale. That means designing for resale, for multiple owners, for ongoing service relationships. Every time the product changes hands is an opportunity to welcome a new customer into your ecosystem.

Measure what matters. Track DPP engagement the way you track marketing campaigns: scan rates, time on page, support deflection, warranty registration conversion, accessory purchase rates, resale facilitation volume. This data will quickly reveal the ROI of your DPP investment — and it will be substantially higher than the compliance-only cost you budgeted for.

The Window Is Closing

There's a brief window — roughly the next 12–18 months — where early-moving brands can build DPP infrastructure that delivers both compliance and commercial value before the enforcement deadlines force everyone else to scramble. Brands that build now will have tested, optimized, and proven their DPP systems by the time competitors are just getting started.

The Bain report makes the case in numbers that are hard to argue with. Double the lifetime value. Up to 65% of gains to consumers. New revenue streams from services, resale, and re-engagement. And all built on infrastructure that regulation is going to require anyway.

The only question is whether you build it as a minimum-viable compliance tool — or as the most powerful post-purchase platform your brand has ever had.

Ninety percent of brands are choosing the first option. The other ten percent are about to have a very good decade.

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Sources

• Digital Product Passports Introduce New Sources of Value — Bain & Company (June 2025)
• Digital Product Passports Could Double Fashion Products' Lifetime Value — Bain & Company Press Release
• Digital Product Passport: A New Era of Trust and Transparency — Certilogo Survey via FashionUnited
• ThredUp 13th Annual Resale Report — 2025
• How Luxury Brands Are Embracing Digital Product Passports — FashionBI
• Digital Passports in Fashion: The New Era of Transparency — GreenStory
• DPPs Required by EU Legislation Across Sectors — Circularise
• Post-Purchase Engagement Guide 2025 — Emplicit
• Customer Engagement Statistics 2026 — InsiderOne