OTB, the international fashion and luxury group that owns brands like Jil Sander, Maison Margiela, and Marni, announced Wednesday that it will provide blockchain-based digital authenticity certificates for all products from those labels starting with the Fall/Winter 2024/2025 collections.
The certificates utilize blockchain technology and an NFC (near-field communication) chip embedded in each garment or accessory. This allows customers to verify a product's authenticity by scanning the chip with their smartphone, accessing a tokenized certificate that’s stored as an NFT on a blockchain network.
"This is an important advance in the OTB innovation process, because it enables us to guarantee greater transparency, new ways of interaction, and an increasingly high-profile experience for our luxury brands' clients," said Stefano Rosso, Marni CEO and a board member of the Aura Blockchain Consortium, in a statement.
OTB, a member of the Aura Consortium, has already registered about 1.2 million products with NFC chips on Aura's Ethereum-compatible blockchain network since early 2022. With the process now standardized across all luxury brands, OTB expects to register over 1.5 million products annually.
"Full-scale adoption of blockchain technology and its integration with our production processes means we shall be able to respond promptly to all the challenges and opportunities presented by future legislation," Rosso said.
The Aura Consortium includes more than 40 leading luxury brands across multiple industries, including giants like Louis Vuitton, Prada, Mercedes Benz, and Tiffany & Co. More than 40 million products have been registered on its private chain to date, the Consortium announced in May.
The Aura platform lets brands enable not only digital authentication functionality, but also the ability for brands to directly engage with customers and for people to transfer on-chain ownership of items.
Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Andrew Hayward.