trigema: Building the “Most Honest T-Shirt in the World” with a Little Help from Retraced

“We’re proud of being a family business,” says Simone Nuccio, Head of Production and Certifications. “This is not just marketing. We actually operate this way: long-term, loyal, and focused on doing the right thing.” 

This ethos shows in the company’s mission: to produce the most honest T-shirt in the world. But as certifications and regulatory requirements piled up, the effort to prove that honesty became a growing operational burden.

trigema keeps their administration lean and with many people wearing multiple hats documentation quickly became a bottleneck.

“We had no dedicated sustainability manager, no certification officer, that was all me,” says Simone Nuccio, Head of Production and Certifications. “And I’m also leading production and temporarily overseeing procurement. There just wasn’t room for inefficiency.” 

As more certifications were added, including Grüner Knopf and Cradle to Cradle, the workload kept rising. Everything from internal audits to supplier certificates had to be tracked, verified, and prepared manually. “We’re a bit document-lazy,” he adds with a smile. “We had all the data, but it lived in different places. It wasn’t centralized, and it wasn’t scalable.” It was getting to the point where audit prep meant working nights and weekends, and that wasn’t sustainable. 

Retraced entered the picture through a chance meeting between trigema’s CEO and one of Retraced’s founders. But the decision to implement it wasn’t based on a handshake but on impact.

Retraced’s structure made it easier to map risks, track certifications, and prepare for audits in one place. And unlike other tools that approached them with vague offers, Retraced had a clear plan. “Other platforms came to us and promised to help with the DPP. But they couldn’t tell us what we’d actually need,” says Nuccio. “Retraced has experts who keep us in the loop about current legislation and develop their platform accordingly.”

Implementation was straightforward. Retraced handled most of the supplier onboarding and supported the internal rollout, even during the years when trigema didn’t use the platform to its full potential.

Many of those relationships have existed for decades and Retraced made it easier to keep them running smoothly. “We still pick up the phone and talk,” says Ilhan. “But now we don’t have to ask for the same certificate three times. It’s already in the system.”

With Retraced, preparing for audits, verifying certifications, and publishing sustainability reports is far easier.

trigema sees Retraced as an important compliance tool as well as the infrastructure for a resilient supplier network, and the basis for future reporting requirements. “Because our certificates, suppliers, and products are already linked in one system, we’re not starting from zero when the DPP comes,” says Ilhan. “That gives us a real advantage.”

For now, the focus is on expanding the platform’s use internally and with suppliers. “My goal is to make it so we can find any certificate we need instantly,” he adds. “We’ve already come a long way.”

Photo credit: ©trigema