who is liable for incorrect data from a supplier in the passport

What you concretely have to do

What is expected of you

When a passport contains data that come from a supplier — a sub-supplier of wood, foam, fabric, metal frames or hardware — the question "who is liable if this is incorrect" is sensitive. The ESPR does not answer that question with a single name, but with an allocation of roles. Who has which role determines who bears which part of the responsibility.

The manufacturer remains responsible for the passport as a whole

Article 27 of the ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) places the obligations for the product passport on the manufacturer. That is the person who places the furniture on the market under his name or brand. In practice, this means that a company of 10 to 100 employees that has furniture made by a third party — with its own brand on it — cannot get by with "the supplier provided that" as an excuse. The manufacturer is the one who assembles, publishes and must be able to account for the passport. What that means for a specific company depends on the role it plays in the chain; see who is responsible for the digital product passport of furniture for an overview of that role allocation.

Data from the supply chain must be correct, even if you do not collect them yourself

Article 38 of the ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) concerns the requirements for economic operators in the supply chain. That article is relevant as soon as part of the passport information — for example, material composition, origin of raw materials, or a test result — comes from a sub-supplier and has not been measured or established by yourself. For a mid-sized furniture company, this means that the chain of data is just as important as the chain of parts: who supplies what, on the basis of which substantiation, and is that documented.

The passport must contain the correct information, period

Article 9 of the ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) describes what the digital product passport must contain and what requirements it must meet. This provision makes no distinction as to who caused the error. The passport that the end user sees must be correct — whether the incorrect data come from the manufacturer itself, from an importer, or from a sub-supplier of fabric or foam.

Where things go wrong in practice

A few situations recur regularly in the furniture sector.

A fabric supplier provides a certificate on flame-retardant treatment that subsequently does not match the batch actually used. The manufacturer incorporated that certificate into the product passport without further verification, because the supplier has been a long-standing partner.

An importer of furniture from outside the EU receives material data supplied by the factory, translates it into the product passport, and later discovers that the factory had used a generic product description that did not match the specific order. Which party in such a chain performs which role is not always self-evident; see am I an importer or manufacturer under the ESPR for the classification used in that regard.

A company sells furniture under its own brand but outsources production and data supply entirely to the private-label manufacturer, without an agreement on who verifies or supplies which data. In case of inaccuracy, it then becomes unclear who should have noticed; that issue comes up again at who must provide the passport data for private label furniture.

A timber supplier provides a declaration of origin that has not been updated following a change in forestry location, and that declaration ends up in the product passport through an intermediary without anyone having verified the date of the declaration.

A frame component is replaced by an alternative supplier due to a supply problem, and the material data in the product passport are not updated because no one recognized it as a "product modification".

What you can put in order now

A number of documents and agreements make it easier to demonstrate, upon discovery of an error, what steps were actually taken to substantiate the data:

• An overview of which data come from which supplier, per component of the furniture (fabric, foam, wood, metal, fittings), so that in case of a question or complaint, the source of a data point can quickly be traced.
• The underlying certificates, test reports and declarations from suppliers, with a date and a version number, not just the conclusion that was incorporated into the product passport.
• An agreement with suppliers on updating: what happens if a supplier modifies a composition, treatment or origin, and who notifies whom.
• A documented verification step before data from a supplier are incorporated into the product passport — even if that verification is limited to checking the date and validity of a certificate.
• Correspondence with the supplier regarding the accuracy of supplied data, so that it is demonstrable which information was requested and received.
• A contractual agreement on the division of responsibility between manufacturer and supplier in case of incorrect data, insofar as that is civilly agreed between the parties.

For companies that are not themselves manufacturers but nonetheless trade in furniture, different points of attention apply regarding the source of data; see what obligations does a distributor or trader of furniture have for that situation. What precisely happens if an error in the product passport is discovered after the product is already on the market is described at what happens if I don't have a product passport for my furniture — while that concerns the absence of a product passport, the underlying supervisory mechanisms are also relevant for a product passport with incorrect content.

As long as the delegated act for furniture has not yet been published, it cannot be said with certainty which liability allocation will precisely apply to furniture-specific data. The general allocation of roles between manufacturer, importer and supply chain is already established by Articles 9, 27 and 38 of the ESPR.