Does the product passport also apply to custom-made furniture?

What you concretely have to do

What is expected of you

Bespoke furniture makes up a considerable part of the market: project planners fitting out offices, hotels or care facilities with unique pieces, kitchen builders who produce on demand, furniture makers who deliver one-to-one designs. For this group, the question "does the product passport apply to me" is not theoretical, because the answer determines whether a QR code will have to be affixed to each unique piece or not.

Determining whether the product falls under the ESPR

The ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) describes in Article 1 the scope as products placed on the market or put into service. Article 2 provides the definitions used for this purpose, including what counts as a "product" within the meaning of the regulation. For a company with 10 to 100 employees, this means that the first step is not "do we need a passport", but "does what we make fall under the product category that the delegated act will designate". That designation is not yet fixed; what can be done is to check whether the own assortment fits with the products of the furniture industry that fall under the ESPR. Bespoke work is not automatically excluded, and not automatically included — the form of production (bespoke versus standard) is a different criterion than the product category itself.

Distinguishing between bespoke-made and bespoke-assembled

In practice, two things are conflated: a piece of furniture that receives unique dimensions and materials from the drawing board, and a piece of furniture that is assembled from an existing modular system into a bespoke-fit solution. For the first category, the question is whether there is at all a product that is "placed on the market" within the meaning of Article 2 of the ESPR, or a service (a design and build assignment). For the second category, there is usually an underlying series product, and that series product may fall under the regulation even if the final configuration is unique. A company that works bespoke does well to name these two streams separately in its own administration, because the obligation can otherwise look different per project.

Recording what changes per project or per product line

Where a series manufacturer produces one passport per article number, a project planner may have to deal with dozens of variants per order. That requires a way of working in which the basic data (material, origin, composition) is recorded centrally, and the project-specific deviations (dimension, colour, fabric choice) are added to it. Which data exactly that is, is described on the page on the data that goes into the product passport for furniture. For a company without a legal department, this is mainly a matter of arranging the existing order administration so that these data are already there, rather than having to be looked up per project afterwards.

Assessing whether the company's own size plays a role

Smaller players in the bespoke corner often wonder whether their size offers relief. That is a separate question, distinct from the question of whether the product itself falls under the regulation, and is addressed on the page on the product passport for small companies. For project planners, it is relevant here that the size of the planner is not automatically the same as that of the manufacturer from whom the furniture is purchased — the obligation may lie with one of the two parties, depending on who places the furniture on the market.

Where things go wrong in practice

In practice, a number of recurring situations arise in bespoke work and project planning in which it becomes unclear who is responsible for what.

A project planner purchases components (frames, panels, upholstery) from different suppliers and assembles them into a combined piece of furniture. It then remains unclear who places the "product" on the market: the supplier of each component, or the planner who delivers the whole to the end customer.

A furniture maker delivers a unique design for one client, but uses standard sheet materials and fittings from their own range. The question of whether this end product qualifies as a "product" within the meaning of ESPR, or as a made-to-order building structure, is not answered in advance and only becomes relevant when a client requests a digital product passport.

A kitchen builder delivers fixed, built-in kitchens that are attached to the building structure. Here an additional complication arises: the distinction between building product and furniture, which is elaborated separately on the page on built-in furniture and the construction products regulation. Failure to make this distinction in advance risks applying two regulations simultaneously (or neither of them correctly).

A project furnisher assumes that, because it is a unique, non-mass-produced product, no digital product passport is needed — without checking this against the actual product category and without waiting for the delegated act that will determine this per category, as explained on the page on what a delegated act is.

A company incorrectly assumes that bespoke work is in any case excluded, while the current texts of ESPR contain no general exemption for bespoke work or small batches — that distinction must still emerge from the delegated act for furniture.

What you can put in order now

For companies working with bespoke production or project furnishing, it is worthwhile to put a number of matters in order now, even while the precise obligation is not yet established:

• An overview of own product lines, with an indication for each line whether it involves standard production, serial bespoke configuration, or completely unique design per order.
• A documented agreement with suppliers on who supplies which basic data (material, composition, origin), so that this does not have to be requested anew for each project.
• A template for project documentation in which the basic data of an underlying series product are recorded separately from project-specific deviations.
• An internal note on the distinction between "placing a product on the market" and "providing a service" for own bespoke trajectories, as a basis for later assessment once the delegated act is available.
• Contractual agreements with clients (for example project furnishers in healthcare or hospitality) on who is responsible for providing or maintaining the digital product passport, including the period for which data must remain available — an issue that relates to the question how current the data in the passport must be.
• A file per project in which it is documented which components of third parties are involved, so that in the event of a later request for a digital product passport it can quickly be determined which party must supply which data.

These steps do not establish a new obligation that does not exist now, but ensure that a company does not start from scratch at the moment when the delegated act for furniture is published.