Inside the Nexus: Where Compliance Meets Clarity
So, what do you get when you choose to work with the Knowledge Nexus? Well, firstly and most importantly it’s experience, between Josh and myself we have over 60 years’ experience working in the textiles industry.
Josh & Niall, Day 2 Source fashion, London July 2025
In my case specifically it’s raw materials: spinning, knitting, weaving, dyeing, printing and finishing, basically anything that goes into making fabric. I have also worked in testing labs for a number of years and have written standards, test methods and everything in between.
Josh, on the other hand, deals with everything after the fabric has been made, from pattern cutting & making, fitting & grading to certification & supply chain management.
And both of us are passionate about product compliance, whether it’s the product itself, the packaging or the way it’s described to customers around the world we look at the regulations through a different lens, helping you to get a very rounded view on what the regulations may mean for your business.
We offer many ways of working with our clients - sometimes we write manuals and policies, sometimes we help build best practices or support the team with our technical expertise, sometimes we simply answer the questions the teams don’t have the answers to themselves, and sometimes it’s a combination of all of these.
We can also support a team by filling a specific role, usually one that they have identified as missing but are not yet ready for this role to be a permanent addition to the team, or to fill a gap between employees.
I had the pleasure of doing this for one of our clients, a UK based group with a number of well-known names in their portfolio. They needed someone to build the compliance requirements across all brands for global trading to a point where each brand could then take ownership if the processes, fully formed. This was undertaken under a fixed term contract agreement.
Each brand within the group works independently of each other, each with their own performance manuals and their own ways or working. This is not unusual, as when companies are brought into a group they keep their brand identities, with separate marketing and product teams, but often shared resources such as finance or HR.
When a brand joins a group of other brands, one of the main changes can be a shift in sales territories and focus – and this is where we came in. Looking at all sales territories and building an internal system for all brands to use to ensure that all compliance regulations for those territories are consistently met.
What we often find is that businesses looks at product and sales in a different way: the distribution centres may be set up differently; the team infrastructure may have differing roles; the seasonality and the design calendars can also be different.
So how does this affect product compliance do you ask? Well, in every way.
Product compliance is built in to every product from the design onwards, and is the responsibility of all teams. If the design team aren’t designing with the compliance of the end product in mind, or the technical and buying teams are missing key requirements, or the marketing teams are making incorrect claims, then it will fail.
In this project, one of the first things I started to look at was lab testing and the total scale of it across all member brands. The Knowledge Nexus has a wealth of experience with lab testing and negotiating with labs to get the best deals for each retailer. We also look at other benefits offered by the labs, including access to other services which can help streamline processes.
By negotiating with different labs that have global reach and local sites to the manufacturing hubs, we were able to get excellent test package prices that were shared by all the brands and access to a test report management system. This equalled a huge cost saving, not just in the actual cost of testing, but also in the hours saved by the technical teams in reading, sorting and filing test reports.
Next was the EPR requirements for packaging and textiles.
Some compliance work had already been done when the French AGEC law first came into effect, although it was left static as the group was missing that key compliance role to manage it. We looked at the levels of sales and a full breakdown of products going into France for the brands to see what needed to be done and how we should advise them to behave. Combining the three systems into one simple dataset to extrapolate what this means for each country in Europe was a lengthy task especially for the textile EPR schemes that existed at the time.
From this we recommended some future work: rationalisation of garment bag sizes and rationalisation of all labelling and packaging suppliers to make collecting data for declarations simpler and more efficient, as well as reducing unnecessary packaging.
For the EPR schemes, the information was given country by country based on the group’s sales territories, and we reviewed to see if the brands should make make individual declarations or to declare as a single entity to be the most cost effective.
For example, certain countries have a reducing scale of fees based on larger volumes, so the more you sell the lower the fees per item, as such we advised our client to operate as a group entity whereas where a country has a threshold before which no fees are payable, then we advised they behaved as different companies. While this does mean a little more work for the teams it is offset by better fee management.
We then produced a list of all of the compliance requirements for the brands across all of their trading areas. This took the form of a risk analysis with a resulting RACI to ensure that each brand and the group as a whole had a clear framework to implement. Included in this section was a bespoke document showing all relevant legislation already in place and what, at that time, we knew was upcoming. This landscape has since had further seismic changes, and will continue to do so for the next few years.
Finally, we then offered the technical teams of each brand training on fabric and testing. This was completed over a period of 6 weeks and covered everything from fibre spinning through knitting & weaving to dyeing, printing and finishing. We also gave a specific denim training segment and another on how to interpret test reports.
We completed the contract within the 6 month time frame with the group in a better informed state, with processes put in place so that they can ensure compliance in all areas goping forwards, with new best practices built and a clear structure for the teams to follow.
If you or your brand feel that you need guidance or support with any of the above, please get in touch.