Data Carriers Explained: QR, RFID and NFC on a Garment

Every digital product passport conversation eventually arrives at a physical question: what is actually on the garment? The regulation describes what information must be accessible, but the mechanism that links a physical item to a digital record is a separate engineering decision — and one factories are increasingly being asked to have a view on.

The first thing to be clear about is that none of these technologies holds the passport. A QR code is a pointer, not a container. It encodes a link, and the link resolves to a record that lives somewhere else. This matters because the hard part is never printing the code — it is maintaining the record behind it, for every style, for as long as anyone might scan it.

A printed QR code costs almost nothing, works with any smartphone camera and survives normal laundering if it is specified properly. Its weaknesses are equally plain: it must be visible to be read, it can be damaged, and it is trivially copied onto a counterfeit. For a single garment scanned at point of sale or by a consumer, these trade-offs are usually acceptable.

RFID carries an identifier that a reader can pick up without line of sight, which is why it dominates in warehouse and inventory handling rather than on the shop floor. It costs more per unit, requires readers at every point where the tag is expected to be read, and introduces a decision about whether the tag stays on the garment after sale. NFC is a near-field variant with a shorter range and better resistance to casual interception, and it is the technology most consumer phones can already read.

The practical advice is unglamorous: choose the carrier based on where the scan actually happens and who does it, not on which technology is newest. A factory shipping to several brands will in any case be told what to apply. What is worth deciding now is not the carrier but whether the record it points at exists, is complete, and can be maintained per style — because a code that resolves to an empty page is worse than no code at all.