How Glimpact Turns Europe’s Strict Eco-Design Rules into a Competitive Advantage

How Glimpact Turns Europe’s Strict Eco-Design Rules into a Competitive Advantage

Arthur Zaczkiewicz

Wed, July 29, 2026 at 6:24 PM GMT+3 7 min read

The days of fuzzy sustainability claims are numbered. With the EU pushing through its Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) alongside tough new anti-greenwashing rules, compliance has stopped being a back-office concern and become a genuine boardroom issue.

In this exclusive interview, Christophe Girardier, founder and CEO of Glimpact, discusses what this shift actually means in practice—particularly for the fashion and textile sectors now facing mandatory Digital Product Passports (DPPs) and standardized Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodologies.

More from WWD

Girardier explains how Glimpact's technology, already in use at companies such as Decathlon and Lacoste, is helping large enterprises get a handle on messy, fast-changing supply chain data. The upshot: What looks like a regulatory burden can actually become a competitive edge if companies get the data infrastructure right early.

This is the second of a two-part Q&A series. Read the first installment here.

Sourcing Journal: With the European Union's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) coming into force and the ongoing push toward transparent environmental labeling, compliance has become a boardroom priority. How does Glimpact serve as a regulatory compass for global brands trying to bulletproof their environmental communication against greenwashing claims?

Christophe Girardier: First, it's important to revisit the fundamentals of the European regulation on the eco-design of sustainable products (ESPR), which is the first and only truly binding regulation of its kind in the world. The ESPR will profoundly change industrial practices and models.

What is it? The ESPR introduces two major principles:

• Minimum eco-design requirements for products

• A digital passport for each product, certifying its compliance with eco-design requirements and its environmental performance

These two principles will be mandatory for all stakeholders placing products on the European market (manufacturers and distributors). Under this regulation, any product that does not meet these requirements will be banned from entering the European Union market. This represents a major upheaval globally, as the European market is the world's largest economy and a significant risk for all companies that do not prepare for it now.

This regulation, already in force since July 2025, will be progressively applied to all product categories, including textiles and fashion, steel, batteries, detergents, cosmetics, tires, solar panels, etc. The first sectors targeted are the steel and fashion industries, which will see implementation in 2027 through delegated acts that the European Commission will publish in the first quarter of 2027. The upheaval this regulation will bring is therefore imminent!

Eco-design requirements will be defined for each product category according to its specific characteristics and the methodological framework of the PEF method. These requirements could, for example, include a minimum recycled content requirement in raw materials or a minimum level of environmental performance.

We have been very involved in the preparation of this regulation and are actively participating in the European Commission's preparatory studies for drafting the delegated acts, particularly the one relating to the fashion sector. We are also involved in this regulation because Glimpact technology has been selected by the European Commission for the implementation of the regulation concerning the declaration of environmental performance of all batteries and photovoltaic solar panels sold on the European market.

In this context, which should lead all companies, and especially leading players in the U.S., to prepare, the question is no longer whether the ESPR will apply or not, but rather how to turn this regulation into an opportunity, not just another constraint.

This is precisely the objective we are pursuing with the Glimpact platform: to offer companies a powerful and suitable tool, not only to enable them to comply with the ESPR requirements through eco-design of their products according to the defined eco-design requirements and the digital passport, but also, and above all, to showcase the environmental performance of their products to their competitors.

In this respect, what the ESPR will bring is a harmonized and clear global framework that will put an end to the greenwashing that is currently the norm and that makes it impossible to distinguish genuinely virtuous actors from those who remain mired in greenwashing. In other words, the ESPR will further strengthen the position of virtuous companies and marginalize the others, representing a tremendous opportunity for the former.

We therefore support companies, firstly, in accurately measuring the environmental performance of their products according to the ESPR methodological framework, for their declaration in the digital product passport; and secondly, in implementing eco-design processes aimed at anticipating minimum eco-design requirements.

But here again, for companies to assert themselves in this new regulatory context, they must now understand the footprint of their products and promptly implement eco-design processes, which obviously take time to deploy.

Adding to this is the new European directive "Empower Consumers for the Green Transition," concerning the regulation of environmental claims, which has already entered into force and prohibits claims that are not scientifically substantiated. This directive already stipulates that the ESPR methodological framework is considered sufficient to support an environmental claim.

This is yet another powerful safeguard against greenwashing, but also a tremendous opportunity for companies to demonstrate their environmental performance. Ultimately, the ESPR and this directive on environmental claims are ushering in a new era, one where environmental performance will go hand in hand with economic performance.

It is for this era that we are preparing businesses.

Sourcing Journal: For a major enterprise managing hundreds of thousands of active product references, scaling sustainability initiatives can seem operationally daunting. Ultimately, what is Glimpact's core value proposition to these large-scale organizations, and how do you prove that rigorous, science-based environmental measurement actually protects a brand's bottom line?

C.G: Glimpact takes a disruptive approach to measuring environmental footprint, one which takes the scientific rigor of the PEF/OEF framework and combines it with the technological capacity to scale this to size multinational organizations and integrate along their supply chains. Through Glimpact, companies can understand and analyze the environmental impact of their products and their full operational scale, updating this dynamically and automatically, and with specific data.

While this initially may seem daunting for major corporations, the technology is proven and is already in use for companies that sell tens or hundreds of thousands of different products, including Lacoste, Decathlon, Zalando, etc. This large-scale implementation allows companies to dramatically change the way they understand and analyze their organization-level environmental footprint, including Scope 3. With this level of integration, Glimpact has worked with companies that now understand how changes all the way at the farm affect their organization's impact and have revamped not only their company operations but their supply chain as well. This is what Glimpact offers: the ability for companies to achieve their ecological transition.

For a company's bottom line, there is ample evidence that environmental sustainability is not just a moral imperative; it is valuable—in terms of risk mitigation, brand image, and increasingly, consumer sentiment. More and more consumers are considering sustainability when purchasing products, with some who are even willing to pay more for sustainability. The environmental crisis, while it may wax and wane in the mainstream conversation, is never far from the limelight and is constantly thrust back in with every record-breaking heat wave, wildfire smoke event and category five hurricane.

As the effects of the environmental crisis are felt more and more and weigh more heavily on consumers, businesses can either adapt or they can risk losing the confidence of their customers.

My dream is that U.S. businesses, who are some of the largest contributors to the environmental crisis, will become the best users of the PEF/OEF methodology, and through this, pioneer a new era where companies put environmental performance at the heart of their economic model. My goal, and that of Glimpact, is not just to enable companies to reduce their footprint but to transition their economic model to be ecologically sustainable.

Donald Trump may want to Make America Great Again. I want to make the planet great again.

Best of WWD

• Everything You Need to Know About Digital Product Passports

• DTC Explainer: Everything You Need to Know about Direct-to-Consumer