Transpareo
Transpareo does not begin in 2022. It begins in 2001.
The conviction that consumers would demand information about products led to the first portal in 2008 and the first interactive quality seal in 2012. By the time the Digital Product Passport reached the European agenda, the hard questions had long been answered at Transpareo: how do you manage complex product data? How do you present it so that it can be understood? How does a person standing in front of the product get to it?
That is where the lead comes from. Anyone starting with the regulation is building in two years what has grown here over eighteen.
passport
Not an obligation but an asset
Reichelt does not regard the Digital Product Passport as a compliance exercise but as an instrument for organisation, customer relationships and business development.
The data has to be gathered in any case. Once it is structured and available, it improves internal processes, makes quality verifiable and stays with the customer beyond the sale. A legal requirement becomes a lasting asset.
base
Developed in Switzerland, operated in Europe
Development takes place exclusively in Switzerland, with no nearshoring or offshoring. Customer systems run in ISO 27001-certified data centres in Germany. No American or Asian cloud providers.
These are deliberate choices for reliability, data sovereignty and long-term freedom of action. The company's international reach is built on that foundation, not in place of it.
«The Digital Product Passport is set to become the infrastructure for the movement of goods across Europe. Transpareo ensures that the place where in future, information will be stored about what a product contains, where it comes from and what happens to it at the end of its life, that the place is based in Switzerland.»
A company without an apparatus
Transpareo has no employees, no support apparatus, no volume sales force and no investor capital. It is run by a small number of highly experienced managers who also sit on the board and hold shares in the company.
Seen for the first time, the arrangement looks like a cost-cutting exercise. It is in fact an answer to the conditions of this market and to an anticipated shift in how forward-looking companies will be organised.
A conventional company is staffed by employees. They act on behalf of others, or through meetings, and generally do not bear the consequences of their decisions, where decisions are taken at all. Everything that makes organisations slow and expensive has grown out of that gap over the decades: hierarchy, control, reporting, self-protection. Since the work of Jensen and Meckling in 1976, these have been known as agency costs. They are the largest cost block that appears on no balance sheet.
At Transpareo every person in charge is bound three times over. They decide within their area, they sit on the board, and they hold shares directly or indirectly. Principal, supervisor, owner and executor are one and the same person. Everyone involved brings experience and knowledge built up over decades.
In practice the effect shows up above all in speed. Where nobody has to seek approval, there is no approval process. The share of working time spent in meetings falls to a barely noticeable minimum, while the quality of decisions rises.
Without them, there would be no Transpareo
Nineteen years, from the first idea of a transparency portal to the Digital Product Passport. Nobody builds something like that alone, and Reichelt says so plainly: without André Pankratz and Andrea Lehr, neither Cosmetic Analysis nor Transpareo would exist.
André Pankratz
Board member, technology
André Pankratz has been writing software for the web for thirty years. He built Cosmetic Analysis and developed Transpareo out of it, from the signed product passports to the open-source Transpareo Time Machine. In September 2026 he released Transpareo's AI integration. He is responsible for architecture, development and operations, and takes part in the standardisation of the Digital Product Passport, in the UN Transparency Protocol and in CIRPASS-2.
‘I met André nineteen years ago and sensed that he was the right man for what I wanted to build. He turned out to be a stroke of luck: a thinker of rare logical precision who turns every idea straight into action. We complement each other completely.’
Andrea Lehr
Board member, content and cosmetics
Andrea Lehr has run Cosmetic Analysis as a board member since its launch in 2008 and knows from daily operations what manufacturers need for a transparency platform to run reliably for years. At Transpareo she is responsible for customer operations and for working with manufacturers.
‘Andrea prefers to work behind the scenes rather than on stage. Her strength is quiet competence, combined with great empathy.’
last
Why the foundation holds the majority
Transpareo has never taken outside capital and will not do so. The founders are financing international expansion from their own assets as well.
Transferring 51 per cent of the share capital to the charitable Transpareo Foundation secures the company from above. Under its own purpose, the foundation will not be able to sell that majority. The company can therefore be turned neither from within against its substance nor from outside against its purpose.
This is not ideology but a regulatory necessity. The EU requires providers of Digital Product Passports to keep them available for up to ten years after sales end, depending on the sector, even if the original manufacturer no longer exists. An obligation that runs for decades calls for an owner that secures the company for decades.
About the company: transpareo.com
‘Running a business with a few responsible people was always the better principle. It failed on capacity. That limit has gone. What remains is the old merchant's virtue of carrying responsibility rather than distributing it.’