Your compliance team is managing an increasingly complex reality: overlapping due diligence laws, retailer-specific questionnaires on compliance, and mounting pressure to demonstrate responsible sourcing practices.
The good news: TrusTrace and The Industry We Want combined forces to standardize OECD due diligence requirements with a unified questionnaire. Leveraging One Retail Hub, a new platform from TrusTrace, brands can now answer one central human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) questionnaire and easily share it with seven major e-retailers in one go, completely free of charge.
The result: easier and faster data sharing, de-duplication of efforts, and less time spent doing non-value adding work. Early brand users are already reporting 70% reduction in workload.
THE REGULATORY WAVE FORCING CONSOLIDATION
Multiple jurisdictions have enacted or proposed mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence laws in the past few years. Germany's Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG) took effect in 2023. The EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) is moving toward implementation. Norway, France, and the Netherlands have their own requirements.
These laws share a common foundation: the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct and specific sector guidance for the garment and footwear industry. This framework establishes what "due diligence" means beyond conducting audits. Its purpose is to implement systematic processes to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for human rights and environmental risks throughout your supply chain.
The OECD guidelines require you to:
- Embed due diligence into your policies and management systems
- Identify actual and potential adverse impacts in your operations and supply chain.
- Cease, prevent, or mitigate those impacts.
- Track implementation and results. Communicate how you're addressing impacts.
- Provide for or cooperate in remediation when you've caused or contributed to harm.
These requirements are becoming legal obligations that determine whether you can sell in major markets.
WHY RETAILERS NEEDED TO ACT
Here's where the fragmentation problem emerged. As these laws took effect, retailers needed to verify that their brand partners were meeting due diligence requirements. But each retailer developed its own assessment questionnaire.
The result: brands selling through multiple retailers were answering fundamentally similar questions, all rooted in the same OECD framework, but in different formats, on different timelines, through different systems.
For small and medium-sized brands in particular, this created a disproportionate burden. The administrative complexity of managing multiple assessments was consuming resources that could have been directed toward improving due diligence practices.
Retailers recognized they were collectively creating inefficiencies. If they're all assessing compliance with the same underlying OECD framework, why not use a shared questionnaire?
THE SOLUTION: BRAND DUE DILIGENCE QUESTIONNAIRE
Seven major fashion retailers–Zalando Group, ABOUT YOU, ASOS, Boozt, Ellos Group, New Look, The Very Group and Zalando–launched the Brand Due Diligence Questionnaire alongside TrusTrace, Cascale and Fair Wear. The technology foundation to this is One Retail Hub by TrusTrace.
This is a single, 51-question self-assessment strictly grounded in the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct and specific sector guidance for the garment and footwear industry. The participating retailers have agreed to accept this questionnaire as their shared standard.
Instead of completing separate assessments for different retail partners, you complete one questionnaire that multiple retailers recognize.
More importantly, the questionnaire gives you a structured way to diagnose the status of your due diligence systems. The questions map directly to regulatory requirements, so your assessment results show you where you're meeting compliance expectations and where gaps exist.
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
Two reasons make this particularly urgent:
Enforcement is accelerating. Germany's LkSG has moved from familiarization to active enforcement. EU CSDDD implementation is approaching. Regulators are increasingly asking companies to demonstrate that they have systematic due diligence processes in place–not just audit reports.
Retail partnerships depend on it. If you sell through any of the seven participating retailers, you'll eventually transition to this unified assessment. Your ability to maintain those partnerships increasingly depends on demonstrating compliance with their unified requirements.
KEY ACTIONS FOR BRANDS
Three actions to consider:
Understand the OECD framework. If you haven't reviewed the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct, start there. This is what regulators and retailers are using as their compliance baseline. Your due diligence systems need to reflect these six steps.
Assess your data readiness. The Brand Due Diligence Questionnaire covers the full scope of HREDD–from governance structures to supplier risk assessment to grievance mechanisms. Review whether you currently have the documentation, data systems, and processes to respond comprehensively.
Apply the same logic to your supplier relationships. If you're benefiting from retailers consolidating their requirements, consider whether your suppliers would benefit from the same approach. Standardizing how you collect traceability and compliance data from your supply chain, with a platform like TrusTrace, reduces their administrative burden and improves your data quality.
THE DIGITAL PLATFORM: ONE RETAIL HUB
To make the questionnaire accessible, the retailers partnered with TrusTrace to build One Retail Hub. It’s a free digital platform that hosts the unified questionnaire and manages data exchange.
One Retail Hub removes the financial barrier to participation. Whether you're a global brand or an emerging company, you access the same assessment without licensing fees.
You complete the questionnaire on your timeline, see real-time results as you progress, and receive a diagnostic report identifying specific improvement areas. The platform also connects you to NGOs and expert partners who can help with remediation.
This infrastructure approach matters because it signals where the industry is headed: shared standards supported by accessible technology, reducing administrative overhead so companies can focus on actual improvement.
The same principle applies to supplier data collection. When suppliers can share standardized compliance information through unified systems rather than responding to fragmented requests, everyone gains efficiency, and you build the supply chain visibility that regulations require.
THE FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT
Retailers are consolidating their assessment requirements because the underlying regulations are converging around the same framework. For your brand, this consolidation reduces complexity around sharing supply chain data. When seven major retailers agree on what constitutes the minimum expected due diligence, those expectations have the potential to become the de facto standard for the sector.
The question isn't whether you'll need robust risk and due diligence systems. The question is whether you're building them proactively or scrambling to demonstrate compliance when retailers or regulators demand it.
GET ACCESS TO ONE RETAIL HUB
The Brand Due Diligence Questionnaire and One Retail Hub represent a shift toward industry collaboration to accelerate progress on traceable and compliant supply chains. TrusTrace partnered with these retailers to build the platform's infrastructure. Learn more about how One Retail Hub works and sign up here.
