There is a number that should keep every textile exporter in Turkey awake at night: twenty percent.
That is the estimated cost that Turkish suppliers are hemorrhaging annually through fragmented data systems, duplicated workflows, and the operational chaos of managing five, six, sometimes ten brand-specific PLM platforms simultaneously — each with its own language, its own logic, its own demands. It is a figure so embedded in the daily friction of doing business that most have stopped noticing it. But the two industry leaders I sat down with at Texhibition Istanbul this month have not stopped noticing. They have been doing the math. And they see what’s coming.
Ergin Aydın, Chairman of TİHCAD (Textile Exporters and Workers Association) and Co-Founder of Havsa Tekstil, and Birsen Şehirli Tor, Chair of TMMOB’s Chamber of Textile Engineers for the Istanbul Branch and TİHCAD Board Member, represent a rare convergence in Turkey’s textile ecosystem: deep manufacturing experience, engineering authority, and institutional reach.
Between them, they oversee networks touching thousands of Turkey’s estimated 42,000 textile suppliers. And both are increasingly convinced that the European Union’s Digital Product Passport regulation, far from being another compliance burden pushed downward, may be the single greatest infrastructure opportunity that Turkish suppliers have had in a generation.
The System That Isn’t a System
Ask any mid-tier Turkish supplier how they manage product data for their EU buyers, and the answer is almost always the same: however the brand tells them to. One brand wants data entered into Centric PLM. Another uses a proprietary portal. A third still runs on email and Excel. The supplier’s job is to feed every system, every time, in whatever format is demanded. The result is a patchwork of disconnected data streams that drains resources, creates errors, and leaves the supplier with no centralized record of their own capabilities.
“Some brands are asking for this system, another brand is asking for that system. So there is confusion. Suppliers are confused. And the best way still, unfortunately, is email, Excel, and following like that.” — Ergin Aydın, Chairman, TİHCAD
This is not a technology deficit. Turkey’s leading manufacturers are sophisticated operators. Several are already integrating AI into their internal workflows. Aydın himself has been deploying AI tools at Havsa Tekstil for the past three years to accelerate communication and data processing. The problem is structural: each brand relationship creates a separate data silo, and no amount of internal efficiency can compensate for an ecosystem that forces suppliers to rebuild their information architecture with every new customer.
Birsen Şehirli Tor, whose career includes managing a $100M+ portfolio at Li & Fung and leading supply chain digitization projects for Trendyol and Boyner Holding, frames the issue with the precision of an engineer who has worked both sides of the equation.
“If we want to manage something, we have to measure it. All the data, all the history should be there. Thirty percent minimum will be the earning.” — Birsen Şehirli Tor, Chair, TMMOB Chamber of Textile Engineers (Istanbul)
Twenty to thirty percent. The range is significant, but either end represents a transformational margin recovery for an industry where suppliers have been absorbing cost pressure for years. Turkey is no longer the cheapest sourcing destination — and has not been for half a decade. Its competitive proposition now rests on quality, speed, and proximity to the EU market. But that positioning is undermined when a substantial portion of operational cost is consumed by data fragmentation that delivers zero value to the supplier.
The Trust Deficit at the Heart of Transparency
If the data problem were simply technical, it would have been solved already. But underneath the fragmented systems lies a deeper structural dysfunction: a trust asymmetry between brands and suppliers that has calcified over decades.
Aydın put it bluntly during our conversation. Suppliers are afraid of giving information, he said, because they have watched brands take their proprietary knowledge — their dyeing houses, their yarn sources, their development work — and walk it to a cheaper competitor. He described testing this himself, deliberately sharing supplier details with a partner, only to receive calls from other suppliers asking why their proprietary fabric constructions were being shopped elsewhere. The fear is not hypothetical. It is experiential.
“Transparency should be both sides. We are always transparent… but the brands are not opening the doors. They should also.” — Ergin Aydın
Tor reinforced the point with characteristic directness: “They are using Turkey as a sampling room. They should give collection as well as bulk production.” The implication is clear. Transparency and traceability, as currently practiced, flow in one direction only. Suppliers are expected to open their entire operations to brand scrutiny while receiving no reciprocal commitment — not on volume, not on partnership continuity, not on how their proprietary data will be handled.
This is the context that any serious infrastructure solution must address. The suppliers who attended World Collective’s DPP Readiness Workshop at Texhibition — over fifty engaged, more than twenty now progressing toward onboarding — are not resisting digitization. They are resisting vulnerability. And the distinction matters enormously for how the industry approaches what comes next.
The DPP as Inversion, Not Imposition
The European Union’s Digital Product Passport regulation, expected to begin phased enforcement by 2027, will require comprehensive product-level data — materials composition, chemical inputs, environmental impact, chain of custody — to travel with every textile product entering the EU market. For most of the industry, this is being framed as yet another compliance cost that will inevitably land on the supplier’s desk. The conventional wisdom says brands will push the requirements down, suppliers will scramble to comply, and the weakest will be squeezed out.
But there is another way to read this moment, and it is the thesis that World Collective was built around: what if the DPP becomes the mechanism through which suppliers finally own and control their own data?
The logic is straightforward. If a supplier builds their product data, certifications, material libraries, and impact metrics into a centralized infrastructure that they control, they are no longer reactive to every brand’s bespoke system. Instead, they become the authoritative source. Brands access the data they need through permissioned channels. The supplier decides what is visible, to whom, and under what terms. The chain of custody runs upward from the supplier, not downward from the brand.
This is what supplier-first infrastructure actually means in practice. It is not a marketplace. It is not another portal asking suppliers to upload swatches and wait. It is an operating system that gives the supplier the control they have been demanding — control over their data, their narrative, their competitive positioning — while simultaneously delivering the structured, regulation-ready information that brands and regulators require.
For a supplier who currently manages carbon footprint data for Scope 1 and 2 internally but struggles to trace Scope 3 through subcontractors — exactly the situation Aydın described — this infrastructure provides the connective tissue. Fabric libraries, yarn libraries, certification records: all built once, maintained centrally, and deployed across every brand relationship. The redundancy collapses. The twenty percent reappears as margin.
The Ecosystem Problem — And Why Associations Matter
Both Aydın and Tor are clear-eyed about the scale of the challenge. Turkey’s textile industry operates with an estimated 42,000 suppliers. The associations they lead can reach perhaps 500 directly. The awareness gap is enormous, and it is compounded by a structural fragmentation within Turkey’s own industry organizations: some represent only manufacturers in Istanbul, others only fabric suppliers in different regions. The whole-ecosystem view that DPP compliance demands — from farm to yarn to fabric to garment to brand — does not map neatly onto existing institutional boundaries.
“Awareness is the most important thing. We are trying to spread it to all our members and also students via associations. We have some suppliers who are working with the big brands and have that kind of awareness — we are showing them as examples to inspire the others.” — Birsen Şehirli Tor
This is precisely where the partnership between TİHCAD, TMMOB, and World Collective begins to demonstrate its strategic value. TİHCAD is distinctive among Turkish textile associations because its membership spans the full value chain — yarn suppliers, fabric producers, garment manufacturers, exporters. That breadth creates the conditions for exactly the kind of cross-tier coordination that DPP infrastructure requires. Combined with TMMOB’s technical authority and its pipeline of engineering students entering the industry, the institutional architecture for scaling supplier activation already exists.
The work that began at Texhibition — the DPP Readiness Workshop, the supplier workbooks, the onboarding pipeline — is the first tangible layer of that activation. But both leaders are already looking toward September’s exhibition as the next milestone, with plans for expanded programming: webinars, cross-association collaboration, joint training with AI integration, and direct brand engagement sessions that put suppliers and buyers in the same room with infrastructure, not just handshakes.
What Brands Are Missing — And Why It’s Catching Up to Them
There is a parallel crisis unfolding on the brand side that makes this infrastructure moment even more urgent. Global brands are reducing headcount. Technical merchandising teams are being hollowed out. The institutional knowledge that once sat between design intent and manufacturing execution is disappearing. Brands that spent decades pushing complexity onto their supply chains are now discovering that they have lost the internal capacity to manage that complexity themselves.
The result is a growing number of brands reaching outward for help with functions they used to handle internally: regenerative fiber tracing, supplier vetting, material innovation sourcing. These are not small brands. They include some of the largest names in global fashion and retail. And their need creates the demand-side pull that makes supplier-first infrastructure viable at scale.
For Turkish suppliers, this convergence — regulatory pressure from the EU, operational distress from brands, and available infrastructure to centralize their own data — represents a narrow but genuine window. The suppliers who move first will not just be DPP-compliant. They will be the ones brands reach for when they need structured, verified, innovation-ready partners. And the infrastructure they build now will compound over every subsequent brand relationship.
The Red Light and the Rule
Ergin Aydın offered an analogy during our conversation that stays with me. In Turkey, he said, people cross the street on red without looking — until they get a penalty. After the penalty, they stop. In Germany, you do not need the penalty, because the rule is enough.
The DPP is the penalty. It is coming regardless of whether Turkey’s 42,000 suppliers are watching the signal. But the leaders I spoke with at Texhibition are not waiting for the fine. They are building the infrastructure to make the rule irrelevant — because the system they are constructing goes far beyond compliance. It gives suppliers what they have never had: a centralized, controlled, technology-enabled position at the center of their own data. It transforms them from reactive service providers into strategic partners whose information, capabilities, and innovations are findable, verifiable, and valuable on their own terms.
As Aydın put it:
“I don’t need customers. I need partners. And if you are really a strong partner, then you are trusting each other, and you can open all doors.”
The doors are opening. The question for Turkey’s textile industry is who will walk through them first.
About the Interviewees
Ergin Aydın is Chairman of TİHCAD (Textile Exporters and Workers Association) and Co-Founder of Havsa Tekstil, a readywear garment production company. Born in Worms, Germany, and a graduate of İstanbul Marmara University, Aydın has spent nearly three decades in the textile industry, from integrated manufacturing at Urba Dış Ticaret to sourcing leadership at the Arcandor Group’s Alka İstanbul Office. He co-founded Prosoft VR in 2017, launching the Prosoft VR Academy to address digitalization in textile education, and in 2022 co-founded Meta X Create, working at the intersection of metaverse and AI technologies. He has served on the board of the Turkish Clothing Manufacturers’ Association and represented Turkey in EURATEX’s Technology and Qualified Works Study Group.
Birsen Şehirli Tor is Chair of TMMOB’s Chamber of Textile Engineers for the Istanbul Branch and heads TİHCAD’s Women’s Studies and Education Committees. A textile engineer with 35 years of industry experience, Tor began her career in advanced denim training at VF Corporation’s Lee & Wrangler facilities in Belgium. She subsequently served as General Manager at Li & Fung, managing a $100M+ portfolio across Asia and Europe, guided digital brand creation at Trendyol.com, helped launch the fashion category at n11.com, and led Boyner Holding’s Private Label Sourcing Consolidation Project with Boston Consulting Group. She currently directs Global Sourcing & Technical Operations for a major international jeanswear brand.
Written by Jeanine Ballone, Founder & CEO of World Collective, a supplier-first operating system for global textile sourcing. With 25+ years in the textile industry including a decade leading global innovation at PVH (Calvin Klein portfolio) and earlier years building operations for Otto Versand in Turkey and India, Ballone brings lived supply chain experience to the infrastructure she is building. World Collective’s platform spans supplier markets in Turkey, Morocco, India, Portugal, Colombia, and the US, with DPP infrastructure built in partnership with Kinset.
