Digital Passport Touch: Digital Product Passport Solution for Luxury Brands

Digital Passport Touch is a React Native mobile app that enables a leading luxury brand to implement the EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) under the ESPR Regulation: unified scanning of jewelry, bags, and watches with up to 99% accuracy, processed entirely on-device.

The challenge: a centralized scanning system for EU Digital Product Passport compliance

The EU ESPR (Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation) introduces the Digital Product Passport mandate: every product must be digitally traceable, accessible via QR code, NFC, or DataMatrix. For a brand with a portfolio spanning jewelry, bags, and watches, this meant building a precise, unified identification system — a significant technical challenge.

Our client, a leading enterprise in the luxury jewelry sector, was facing serious issues with their product verification process.

There was no single solution capable of scanning different product types with the required precision. Previous solutions were fragmentary and — critically — unable to read serials engraved on jewelry, which was still done manually, with error margins unacceptable for a high-end brand.

The curved surfaces of jewelry made serial recognition particularly difficult. Systems previously tested could neither adapt to these particularities nor integrate with existing management software, further fragmenting the process.

Scanning bags and watches presented similar challenges: data recorded by hand, complex traceability, and excessive waiting times for end customers.

The customer experience suffered as a result: validation and after-sales support times were too long, undermining confidence in the brand’s post-purchase service.

The client needed a modular and scalable platform — aligned with brand guidelines, accessible to any user, and able to automate internal processes — while fully complying with EU Digital Product Passport requirements.

Our solution: Digital Passport Touch

To address these needs, we built Digital Passport Touch, a mobile app providing a unified product recognition platform — DPP-compliant — using best-in-class identification technologies.

At the heart of the app is an intelligent recognition system integrating OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and machine learning, built on advanced computer vision techniques.

We developed the app from scratch using React Native to deliver a native, unified experience on iOS and Android, selectively reusing existing logic from the previous system for bags and watches. The real technical challenge was engraved jewelry serials — no existing solution could handle them with the required precision.

Here’s how we solved it.

We integrated Apple Vision (iOS) and Android ML Kit (Android) into the app to extract text from user-captured images. On top of this, our team built a layer of advanced customization, fine-tuning models to improve scan accuracy even on complex or reflective surfaces.

The automated scanning flow runs in five steps:

1. The user photographs a product — the app initiates the scan.
2. The sharpest frame from the captured sequence is automatically selected.
3. The app runs OCR on the selected frame to extract a candidate serial.
4. The result is analyzed using proprietary algorithms built specifically for this use case, with high tolerance and precision in recognition.
5. For each result that passes the filtering stage, the app checks for a match in the internal database. If the serial is found, the process completes successfully.

The system doesn’t stop at the highest-confidence OCR result: it continues analysis until it achieves a definitive match against the database, using multiple readings for a more informed decision. To understand the underlying technologies, explore our blog on Azure Cognitive Services.

User experience and offline operation

Digital Passport Touch does not work like a standard cloud service: scanning, OCR processing, and product sheet lookup all happen entirely on-device, without sending images to remote servers.

This guarantees speed and full functionality even without an internet connection — an important advantage in luxury retail environments where connectivity may be limited.

The interface is designed to reflect the brand’s visual identity: sophisticated, elegant, accessible to non-technical users. Navigation elements minimize steps and scrolling, guide the user through product information, and present each item with high-quality visual rendering across all mobile devices.

The result is a fluid, frictionless experience — from scan to DPP product sheet — that feels native to the luxury world.

Results

Within the agreed timeframe, we delivered an app that fully meets the client’s requirements and EU Digital Product Passport compliance:

• Proprietary Computer Vision algorithms: purpose-built models delivering fast, reliable results with minimal false positives even in difficult lighting or positioning conditions.
• Category-specific scanning with multiple technologies: serial recognition via computer vision, NFC tag reading, and DataMatrix decoding. Each category (jewelry, watches, bags) has a dedicated, optimized scanning flow.
• 100% on-device processing: all recognition functions run entirely on the mobile device, delivering real-time performance without compromising accuracy.

Accuracy benchmarks from collected data:

• Difficult conditions (very low-quality images): 80% accuracy — significantly outperforming previous manual verification.
• Good conditions (acceptable photos): 93%.
• Optimal conditions (jewelry with mechanically engraved serials): 99%. Actual data indicates 100%, but we take a conservative approach: acknowledging a margin for error is what drives us to keep improving.

The client has reported excellent feedback since launch — a result that validates the value of custom software development built around the specific constraints of the luxury sector.

Ready to build a similar solution? Explore our custom software development services and get in touch.