VVAST named platform partner for European Outdoor Group's new sustainability data pilot

Following four separate EU and UK anti-greenwashing deadlines that landed between July and October 2026, Bristol SaaS startup vvast has been selected as a platform partner for the European Outdoor Group's SDEX pilot. Led by direct-to-consumer veteran Richie Jones, the company has paused its storefront product to build the compliance data engine needed by outdoor apparel brands facing mandatory Digital Product Passports and packaging penalties.

The outdoor apparel sector has moved ahead of European regulators to standardise supply-chain compliance data. In July 2023, the European Outdoor Group (EOG) and Germany's BSI established SDEX to replace incompatible sustainability spreadsheets across more than 160 member organisations. In July 2026, the EOG selected Bristol software firm vvast as one of seven platform partners to turn the standard into a digital ingestion engine for active ordering. vvast's platform pilot is currently open to an initial brand cohort at vvast.net/eog. The tool ingests SKU-level supplier data before purchase orders are placed, cutting an estimated 800 hours of seasonal reporting per brand while calculating fee exposure under the UK's packaging regime and the EU's incoming Digital Product Passport. Founder and CEO Richie Jones spent nine years scaling European ecommerce for brands including VF Corporation, Deus Ex Machina, and Stance, trading over £200m in gross merchandise value before pausing the company's storefront engine to focus on data compliance. "The cost of compliance is no longer a flat fee; it's directly tied to the quality of your data," says Jones. "The brands that attempted this by hand couldn't justify the resource. Automating the pipeline returns those hours, but the real shift is making data usable to select lower-impact suppliers before a buy is placed, rather than auditing six months late." Interviews and anonymised pilot demonstrations are available with Richie Jones (CEO), Ed Pitt (CTO, leading the data pipeline architecture), and Adam Hall (CSO, former WBCSD and Ellen MacArthur Foundation case-study lead).

Trend context

Between 19 July and 1 October 2026, four key environmental rules took effect across Europe: the EU Ecodesign registry, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, the Empowering Consumers Directive banning unbacked green claims, and the UK's packaging data reporting window, which defaults unassessed packaging into top-tier fee brackets. With major outdoor labels like Patagonia, Rab, and Fjällräven openly acknowledging that Tier-3 supply chain data remains opaque, the pressure has flipped: verifiable product data is no longer just for CSR reports, but a legal prerequisite to trading in Europe.

About vvast

Why we exist

VVAST believes the expertise to grow an ethical ecommerce brand — profitably, compliantly, without racing to the bottom on discount — shouldn't be locked behind agencies only big brands can afford. For ten years that knowledge lived inside a bespoke service model. VVAST exists to productise it: to put enterprise-grade commercial and compliance capability in the hands of brands that could never buy it, and to surface that same trust data to the consumer for the first time.

How we do it

VVAST codifies a decade of real trading — £200m+ GMV across global D2C brands — into software that sits on top of Shopify. Not generic tools, and not a custom agency build, but productised playbook: SKU-level intelligence on which products cost what on compliance, which suppliers to back, which storefront changes recover revenue. A two-sided dataset (merchant behaviour plus consumer trust signals) compounds with every brand that joins, and is enriched by integration with the EOG's SDEX standard.

What we do

VVAST builds a modular suite of Shopify-native and platform-agnostic software: a high-conversion theme engine ("vvastify"), a data-ingestion and impact-reporting tool, and a roadmap of apps covering merchandising, compliance reporting, subscriptions, returns and more — orchestrated by a central AI hub trained on proprietary D2C outcome data. A consumer-facing app is planned as the trust layer. The first shipped product is the ingestion and impact-reporting tool.

Why it matters

Thousands of growing brands are about to be penalised for data they don't have. From April 2026, incomplete UK packaging data automatically lands in the most expensive EPR fee band; from 2027 the EU Digital Product Passport extends the same pressure to every garment sold in Europe. These brands manage it in spreadsheets because the affordable tooling doesn't exist. Without it they overpay on fees, fall foul of green-claims rules, and — increasingly — become invisible to AI shopping agents that only surface verifiable products. The void VVAST fills is the missing infrastructure between "enterprise compliance software" and "a spreadsheet and hope."

Who it's for

The founder-operator of a growing D2C brand — call it £600k to £10m in revenue — who sells on Shopify, believes in doing things properly, and has just realised that EPR, plastic tax and the Digital Product Passport are landing on a team that doesn't have a compliance department. They can't afford an enterprise platform or a full-time sustainability hire. They need their existing data to do the work. That's the person VVAST is built for.

Proof points

£200m+ GMV traded through the vvastify engine over 10 years; £70m GMV in FY24. Core technology deployed globally by one brand at ~$500m GMV per year. B-Corp certified; ISO and Cyber Essentials certified. 72% lower-carbon storefronts — vvastify 2.0 emits 72% less than baseline standard Shopify theme. vvastify built on Shopify Storefront 2.0, in production with listed US brands.

Traction & credibility

Running a pilot on the EOG's SDEX programme — a real, established industry standard adopted across ~125 EOG members. The EOG has allocated VVAST three brands and two retailers to pilot with. Spun out of a 10-year profitable agency with a named roster of D2C brands including VF and Deus. Further brands lined up to pilot, including Santa Cruz and a UK beauty multi-brand (~£32m GMV). Richie Jones is a founding member of The Future Fellowship, an invite-only AI-futures circle convened by futurist David Mattin (Head of Technology Research at GMI). Raising to fund the standalone software build (SEIS/EIS), with institutional seed investors tracking progress.

Spokespeople

Richie Jones

Founder & CEO

Richie spent a decade running VVAST as a managed-services agency, trading £200m+ GMV for global direct-to-consumer brands and building the "vvastify" technology behind it — all while the business stayed in profit. The frustration that drove the pivot: sitting in meeting after meeting presenting insights that could help any brand, knowing they were locked inside a model only big brands could afford. So he's carving the IP out of the agency to productise it as software. He's a founding member of The Future Fellowship, an invite-only circle convened by futurist David Mattin to track how AI reshapes markets — foresight he brings directly into VVAST's roadmap.

Adam Hall

CSO

Adam is an 18-year sustainability strategist known for initiatives that move the standard, not just meet it. Edie named him one of the Top 20 Business Leaders Defining the Next 20 Years of Sustainability, and his work has been featured as a case study by both the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. He co-founded the North Devon World Surfing Reserve — the UK's first environmental designation of its kind — is a long-term trustee of Protect Our Winters UK, and previously served as a trustee of #2MinuteBeachClean. At VVAST, he's the reason the impact claims hold up.

Ed Pitt

Co-founder & CTO

Ed brings 30 years of software development and engineering leadership across startups and scale-ups. He owns the technical bet at the heart of VVAST: that a decade of proprietary D2C outcome data, not a generic model, is what makes the platform's intelligence defensible — the thing a generic SaaS can't replicate and an LLM can't hallucinate its way to. He's the right voice for any journalist who wants to go under the hood on the ingestion pipeline, the SDEX integration, or the "mindful AI" approach.

Talking points

The shift

vvast Selected as Platform Partner for European Outdoor Group's SDEX Sustainability Data Standard

vvast.net/eog

The story

The European Outdoor Group and Germany's BSI launched SDEX in July 2023 to stop brands and retailers re-answering the same sustainability questionnaires in incompatible formats. It is moving from a free Excel tool to a digital platform, and vvast has been selected as a platform partner, named with CircKit in the Outdoor Industries Association's pilot announcement of 20 July 2026. A limited first cohort is open now at no cost.