ApparelSignals was founded on a straightforward observation: the data needed to understand what European fashion is actually made of exists on every product page, but it arrives in a form that makes cross-brand analysis impossible without a normalization layer. We built the normalization layer.
Every product page at every major European retailer contains a material composition declaration. In the EU, this is legally required under Regulation 1007/2011. The data is there. It's public. And it's unusable in its raw form.
The first thing built wasn't a dashboard. It was a material alias table mapping every collected fiber string to a canonical taxonomy entry aligned to EU Regulation 1007/2011. That table was built edge case by edge case, with explicit rulings on ambiguous inputs.
The same process was applied to care instructions and to production country normalization, including regional naming questions and alias cleanup across multiple languages. The result is a database where every row means the same thing as every other row using the same label.
That consistency is the entire point. Without it, a dashboard is decoration. With it, the market becomes comparable.
Retailer product pages declare material composition by law. But the declared values are unstructured strings. 'Polyester', 'polyester (PES)', 'poliester', and '100% PES' are four representations of the same fiber. Before any analysis is possible, that inconsistency has to be resolved.
The first deliverable was a material alias table mapping raw collected fiber strings to canonical taxonomy entries aligned to EU Regulation 1007/2011. PLA is synthetic. MDF is natural despite synthetic binders. Branded fibers like TENCEL and LYCRA are composition entries, not certifications.
The same methodology was applied to care instructions and production country. Every field in the database has a corresponding alias table. None are left to interpretation.
Variant-weighted aggregation was a deliberate architectural decision. A product available in multiple colorways and sizes represents multiple manufactured SKUs. The database treats each variant as its own data point.
The dashboard, API, and export tools are interfaces to the underlying normalized database. The defensibility of ApparelSignals is not in the charts. It's in the alias tables and rulings that make cross-brand comparison possible at all.
Every dataset is shaped by the choices made during its construction. These are the explicit rules that govern ApparelSignals and determine whether a cell in the database contains a number you can trust.
If a brand doesn't state it, we don't record it. No extrapolation from similar products, no default values, no inferred certifications from reputation or marketing language.
Every classification decision is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. A fiber is natural, regenerated, or synthetic. When a term appears in multiple taxonomy paths, it gets renamed into distinct entries rather than left ambiguous.
TENCEL, LYCRA, and ECONYL are trade names, not third-party certification standards. They belong in the composition field, not the certification field.
A product that comes in multiple colorways is multiple manufactured SKUs, not one product. Aggregating at product level averages away information brands actually make decisions on.
The EU textile labelling regulation defines the canonical list of fiber names. That list is the normalization target, not common usage or brand preference.
The dashboard and API are interfaces. The real defensibility is in the manually reviewed normalization layer that makes cross-brand comparison possible at all.
Release notes, coverage expansions, and research notes on fashion material markets.
A placeholder methodology post outlining sourcing, normalization, and QA logic.
Placeholder announcement for a catalog expansion across premium, sportswear, and fast-fashion groups.
A placeholder snapshot of what changed across cotton, synthetics, and blend mixes in the first release cycle.
If you've found a classification error in the data, have a question about the methodology, want to suggest a retailer for coverage, or are evaluating ApparelSignals for a specific research or business use case, reach out directly.
Start with the free resources: the Natural Fiber Products list, the Fashion Empire visualization, and the Fabric Library. No account required.
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