NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK / ACCESS Newswire / January 21, 2026 / SMX PLC (NASDAQ:SMX; SMXWW) is positioning its physical-to-digital traceability platform as a response to some of the most persistent pressures facing fashion and luxury today-pressures underscored in The State of Fashion 2025. Excess inventory, chronic overproduction, inefficient supply chains, and rising mandates to include and verify recycled content are no longer isolated problems. Together, they reveal a deeper structural weakness.
At its core, the industry is struggling with continuity.
Fashion is built from materials that carry essential information long before a garment is finished-where fibers originated, how they were processed, what was added, blended, or reclaimed along the way. Yet as those materials move through global production networks, that information steadily detaches. Not because brands ignore it, but because legacy systems were never built to preserve identity across today’s scale, speed, and complexity.
Once materials lose their history, every downstream decision becomes harder.
Inventory Breakdown Is a Symptom, Not the Disease
The most obvious consequence appears in inventory.
Brands sit on surplus stock while simultaneously failing to meet demand in the right styles, sizes, or markets. Warehouses overflow, discounting accelerates, and products that should retain value instead become financial and reputational burdens.
This imbalance is often blamed on forecasting errors. But forecasting alone doesn’t explain why brands struggle to act decisively once inventory exists. The real issue is clarity. When materials and finished goods lose definitional precision as they move through supply chains, inventory stops being actionable.
Brands may know how much they have-but not always what they have, where it should go, or how it can be redeployed in ways that remain compliant, profitable, and aligned with sustainability commitments.
Without durable identity, inventory becomes indistinct. And indistinct inventory is managed defensively rather than strategically.
Why Paper Trails Fail Long Before Products Do
Most traceability and compliance frameworks still depend on documentation that ages poorly.
Labels are removed. Certificates expire. Records are scattered across systems that don’t travel with the product itself. The attributes that matter most-recycled content, sourcing integrity, regulatory eligibility-are often separated from the materials they describe.
For premium and luxury brands, this creates a fundamental mismatch. Products are designed for longevity, resale, and reuse. Proof is not. As time passes, uncertainty grows, even around legitimate goods.
That uncertainty drives blunt decision-making. Instead of precision redistribution or targeted reuse, brands default to clearance and write-downs to reduce exposure. Value erodes. Sustainability goals weaken. Brand equity takes collateral damage.
Embedding Memory Where It Can’t Be Lost
Solving overproduction and recycled-content verification challenges requires more than better planning tools. It requires continuity at the material level.
By embedding identity directly into raw materials, SMX enables information to persist through manufacturing, logistics, resale, and recycling. Identity no longer has to be reconstructed after the fact. It is carried forward automatically, inseparable from the material itself.
When that continuity exists, inventory behaves differently. Brands can distinguish between products that meet regulatory thresholds and those that don’t. They can confidently route goods into resale, redistribution, or recycling streams without guesswork. Compliance shifts from assumption to proof.
In an industry facing mounting regulation, margin pressure, and growing scrutiny around sustainability claims, remembering what was made-and what it truly contains-is becoming foundational.
Memory, once an afterthought, is now a prerequisite for control.
Contact: Jeremy Murphy / jeremy@360bespoke.com
SOURCE: SMX (Security Matters) Public Limited
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