From Hands to Hands: The Work and Value of Artisans
Over 1,300 artisans in Kenya, Ghana, and Tanzania create Mifuko’s products using traditional techniques. Their work offers income, stability, and social security for local communities. Every product bears the name of its maker, reminding customers that behind each item there is a person — and that their work has value.
Mifuko’s commitment to responsibility is not rhetoric but verified action. This can be seen in their carbon footprint reporting and their B Corp certification. These elements reinforce what has been true all along: transparency is a value, not a trend.
Ovido’s digital product passport carries this idea forward. It provides a better way to bring transparency and core principles into digital form. It includes not only the maker’s name but gives them a digital voice that stays with the customer as naturally as the product itself.
It is a simple change that can have a meaningful impact.
Making the Journey Visible: How the Product Passport Works in Practice
For Mifuko, the new European ecodesign and product passport requirements are first and foremost an opportunity — a way to tell an honest story without making the process burdensome, and a way to demonstrate that the company truly lives by its core values.
The Ovido platform brings together materials, origin, carbon footprint, care instructions, and artisan information in one place. A scannable code reveals the journey of the product: from banana fiber to the customer’s hands, from the artisan’s workspace to the home where the product becomes part of someone’s daily life.
This is not bureaucracy. This is visibility. Executed subtly and clearly.
Transparency That Empowers
Transparency does not expose weaknesses — it brings forward what is strong. For artisans, the digital product passport offers recognition that a traditional product tag could never convey. For customers, it provides a direct connection to how responsibility is created in practice and why every choice matters.
When information is open and its source can be verified, data becomes trust. And trust builds a brand better than any campaign.
Technology in the Background: Ovido’s Role
Good technology does not compete with the story. It gives it space.
Ovido makes collecting and sharing data simple and automatic. Work that once took days can now be completed in minutes. When Mifuko was searching for a solution for implementing the digital product passport, the most important requirement was a system that supports their values rather than drawing attention away from them.
Ovido was built precisely for this. It stays in the background so that the people and the craftsmanship can remain at the forefront.
A Clear Path Forward: When Slowness Leads
Mifuko has been transparent long before any regulation required it. The digital product passport strengthens this — not by changing Mifuko’s identity but by making it even more verifiable.
It is a small counterforce to fast fashion. Not by adding speed, but by showing that slowness can lead when work is grounded in values.
When stories and data move side by side, a new kind of trust is formed.
Trust in the product. Trust in the people. And trust that technology can be just as human as craftsmanship.
