Natasha
Franck

Pick up a bag from Coach's Coachtopia line and hold your phone near it. The bag answers. It knows what it is made of, where it came from, who designed it, and how many lives it has already lived. That conversation is not magic - it is a Digital Product Passport, and the company quietly running it is EON.

Natasha Franck founded EON in New York in 2017 on a stubborn idea: that a physical object should carry its own data the way a person carries an ID. Not a barcode that points at a price, but a unique digital identity that stays with the item from the factory floor to its fourth owner. EON calls the standard the CircularID Protocol, and made it open so the whole industry could speak the same language.

The problem she set out to solve was the unglamorous one nobody wanted. Brands kept announcing circular collections - garments designed to be resold, repaired, recycled. But once an item left the store, it vanished from view. There was no system to trace it, no way to know where it went or to capture value from its second life. Franck noticed the intention was everywhere and the infrastructure was nowhere.

So she built the infrastructure. With an embedded chip or code - NFC, RFID, a QR - each product gets a profile in the cloud. Brands can verify authenticity, enable repair, power resale without manual data entry, and watch how products are consumed and re-consumed long after the first sale. The clothes become, in Franck's framing, intelligent assets.

It is a strange place to land for someone whose first career was about buildings, not blouses. Franck spent seven years in sustainable urbanism and smart cities - first at Jonathan Rose Companies, then as a senior business development executive at Delos, the wellness-real-estate company. Cities taught her that connectivity and intelligence were the levers for sustainability at scale. She simply pointed the same lever at your wardrobe.

That bet now has weight behind it. Coach, Chloe, Mulberry and YOOX Net-a-Porter have adopted EON's technology. In 2024, Poshmark, EON and Coachtopia teamed up to launch instant resale in the United States, collapsing the friction of secondhand selling into a tap. And as the European Union writes Digital Product Passports into law, EON has been part of the CIRPASS-2 pilot helping codify how the whole thing should work.

Most retail logic ends at checkout. The sale closes, the relationship ends, and the brand loses sight of the object forever. Franck's argument is that this is a colossal waste - of data, of value, and of any real shot at sustainability.

Her reframe is the digital twin. Give a product a persistent identity and it stops being a one-time transaction. It becomes a thread that brands can follow across multiple owners and multiple lives. A jacket resold three times is no longer lost revenue - it is three more touchpoints, three more chances to authenticate, service, and monetize.

"Now we can actually look at brands monetizing products with second and third lives, which will incentivize and build a new revenue stream for brands," Franck has said. The sustainability case and the business case stop fighting each other. Keeping a product in circulation becomes the profitable move, not the charitable one.

That alignment is why regulators are paying attention. The EU's Digital Product Passport rules will require traceability and transparency that simply did not exist before - and EON has spent years building exactly that. The company is positioned less as a vendor and more as the connective tissue of a new circular economy.