Wednesday, October 14, 2026
TRASCE: Revolutionizing Sustainable Traceability in Luxury and Cosmetics
Edition Spéciale by LUXE PACK
Discover how TRASCE brings together 18 players from the luxury and cosmetics industries to build sustainable, transparent traceability aligned with new European regulations, making collective collaboration the driving force behind a more responsible value chain.
Sustainable traceability has become a major challenge for the luxury and cosmetics sectors, which now face unprecedented environmental and regulatory requirements. Given the scale of global challenges, from limited resources and tight timelines to increasingly complex value chains, isolated initiatives are structurally reaching their limits.
Born from the vision of the House of Chanel and now bringing together an ecosystem of eighteen leading brands and suppliers, the TRASCE consortium is establishing a new standard of excellence. By pooling expertise, data and collective priorities, the group demonstrates that collaboration between companies and suppliers is key to building resilient supply chains. Each consortium member commits to clearly defined rights and responsibilities, in a spirit of cooperation that goes beyond traditional competitive dynamics.
The transformation of business models toward full transparency can no longer rely on statements of intent alone. It requires cross-sector collaboration capable of addressing social and environmental issues at their source. The TRASCE consortium is part of this disruptive movement, where competition gives way to a greater shared objective: ensuring the long-term resilience of responsible supply chains and compliance with future standards.
Through this collective approach, the beauty sector is not simply adapting to change, it is becoming a catalyst for systemic transformation across global industry.
The TRASCE Consortium: A Coalition Supporting Responsible Supply Chains
An unprecedented collective initiative, the TRASCE consortium brings together brands, suppliers and technology partners around a shared, secure platform. The group is built on common objectives and clearly defined responsibilities for each signatory, ensuring structured and effective collaboration.
Its core objective is to accelerate the transition toward sustainable traceability that can be replicated and made accessible across the entire value chain. This coalition of voluntary organizations, including luxury brands, Tier 1 to Tier 9 suppliers and technology partners, shares common metrics and collaborative studies to overcome fragmented data and establish a common language, essential for effectively addressing climate-related and ethical challenges.
Collaboration between signatories is based on shared regulatory commitments, particularly in the areas of human rights and due diligence, making each member an active contributor to the transformation of the sector.
According to Céline Bomo-Leducq, representing L'Oréal, individual initiatives do not have sufficient critical mass to create decisive market impact. Sharing best practices, rather than weakening competitive advantage, helps harmonize methodologies and priorities for action within the collective framework.
This synergy accelerates partner engagement and strengthens employee pride within each organization. Laurent Schatz of Laboratoires Expanscience supports this analysis, emphasizing that environmental challenges require enormous resources that only such a coalition can mobilize.
Considering that the cosmetics industry uses approximately 3 to 4% of the world's plant-based resources, collective solidarity is essential to exert meaningful influence on the market, particularly compared with sectors such as food and agriculture, which account for the majority of global volumes.
A Two-Dimensional Strategy: Due Diligence and Responsible Supply Chains
TRASCE stands out through a two-dimensional innovation strategy designed to address the complexity of supply chains from every angle, applying due diligence principles at each level of the responsible value chain:
- The vertical dimension: This approach focuses on increasing transparency around priority and critical raw materials such as wood, paper and coconut oil. By investigating the deeper layers of the supply chain, companies can identify deforestation risks or human rights violations directly at the source. This forms part of a rigorous and documented due diligence process that respects local communities' rights and international legal commitments.
- The horizontal dimension: This approach aims to share management best practices and harmonize the obligations of partners and signatory organizations throughout the beauty sector. This lateral alliance ensures that studies and results benefit the entire ecosystem.
This comprehensive model makes it possible to address cross-cutting topics such as biodiversity preservation, living incomes for farmers and the renewal of ageing plantations. Through this approach, the TRASCE consortium ensures that transformation is not merely cosmetic, but deeply systemic.
Early Supplier Integration: An Unprecedented Operational Pillar
Unlike traditional coalitions in which brands impose requirements on suppliers, the TRASCE consortium involves its partners from the initial design phase.
Giving processors and packaging manufacturers an equal voice transforms the commercial relationship into a genuine strategic partnership. Suppliers are no longer simply executors. They become active participants in defining CSR roadmaps, with clearly established responsibilities and obligations within the collective framework.
Rémy Kremer of Smurfit Westrock highlights that this early integration enables suppliers to share their own sustainability challenges and long-standing certifications, including FSC and PEFC.
This pooling of knowledge between organizations of different sizes and levels of maturity generates shared monitoring data and mutualized services that benefit the entire group.
Gilles Swyngedauw of ALBEA confirms the impact of this approach. With a global network of 35 factories, connecting sales and purchasing flows to meet new traceability requirements represented a monumental challenge. The TRASCE consortium acted as a catalyst, encouraging each participant to rethink its data structure and engage up to nine tiers of supplier partners through concrete and shared investments.
Governance and Tools: The Keys to the Consortium's Effectiveness
The consortium's success relies on a robust governance architecture designed to ensure the long-term continuity of collective efforts.
Managed by a neutral entity, this institutional framework clearly defines the scope of action and obligations of each member, supported by a strong legal structure that formalizes collaboration between organizations with very different profiles.
The group's effectiveness is supported by three key factors:
- A unified roadmap: Despite differences in maturity and investment capacity among participants, a shared ambition creates a sustained pace of execution and common progress criteria.
- Management by a third party: Facilitation by a neutral entity ensures alignment of interests and helps prevent governance-related obstacles within member organizations. This inter-organizational partnership framework is essential for maintaining the trust of each signatory over the long term.
- The exchange of anonymized data: Through strict security protocols, confidential information belonging to participating organizations is protected. Only aggregated data is used to support collective action on sensitive supply chains such as wood or coconut.
The use of advanced technological tools such as the Transparency-One platform makes it possible to process very large volumes of information while adhering to a strict ethical code.
Each member can only access the level of the supply chain that directly concerns them, protecting against industrial espionage while providing full visibility to auditors.
Laurent Schatz adds that this highly structured approach also makes it easier to integrate new participants through regular outreach, including mid-sized companies, while fostering continuous cross-fertilization through thematic workshops and specialized expert reports.
Turning Regulatory Constraints into Opportunities: EUDR Compliance and Due Diligence
The TRASCE consortium acts as both an observatory and an anticipation tool in the face of the wave of new European regulations.
By preparing its members for EUDR compliance and other upcoming directives, the consortium turns what could otherwise become a paralyzing constraint into a significant competitive advantage.
This shared regulatory framework allows each signatory organization to achieve compliance more quickly and at a controlled cost.
The collective effort focuses in particular on three major pieces of legislation:
- EUDR, the EU Deforestation Regulation: This regulation requires strict geolocation-based traceability and due diligence to prove that products do not contribute to deforestation. EUDR compliance is one of the most structurally important priorities for organizations within the group.
- CSRD, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive: This requires large companies to carry out detailed analysis of data relating to climate, biodiversity and human rights as part of consolidated and auditable reporting.
- CSDDD, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive: This focuses on organizational responsibility for the negative impacts of business activities throughout the value chain, strengthening legal due diligence commitments and stakeholder rights at every level. Cooperation between consortium members is particularly important in responding collectively to these new obligations.
By pooling studies and sharing feedback between partners, the consortium enables its members to anticipate new obligations and address them collectively.
This alliance-based approach also brings greater credibility to due diligence plans submitted to public authorities.
According to Céline Bomo-Leducq, while existing certifications are useful, they often lack the 360-degree perspective offered by the consortium, which works directly with NGOs and field experts to support the most vulnerable or transitioning responsible supply chains.
Future Perspectives and the Ambition for Sector Leadership
Following a period of internal consolidation, the TRASCE consortium is preparing to enter a new phase of public communication with the launch of its first impact report and its web platform.
Its future ambitions are clear: to further standardize data collection by connecting Transparency-One with other global platforms and to launch projects that strengthen responsible supply chains directly in the field, in partnership with local stakeholders and communities.
The group is also targeting international expansion, with the ambition of recruiting new participants in the United States and Japan to harmonize luxury and cosmetics practices on a global scale.
This expansion reflects the consortium's desire to make resource-sharing and collaboration a universal standard rather than an isolated European initiative.
The approach could also extend to other industrial sectors, as challenges relating to the traceability of wood and vegetable oils affect many organizations beyond cosmetics.
The strength of the collective lies in its ability to bring stakeholders together and expand its impact well beyond its original boundaries.
Conclusion: Collective Action as the Foundation of Responsible Beauty
TRASCE demonstrates that bringing brands and supplier partners together around a shared vision is the only way to address the ecological and social challenges of the century.
Through its inclusive governance structure, the consortium transforms EUDR compliance and due diligence requirements into drivers of efficiency and trust.
This coalition illustrates that competitiveness and sustainability are two sides of the same coin, and that the future of the cosmetics industry will depend on its ability to build responsible supply chains, one link at a time.
