Carbonfact Acquires Vaayu: Fixing The Seams In Fashion's Product-Level Environmental Data
On May 28, 2026, Carbonfact announced the acquisition of Vaayu, consolidating two software providers built around LCA and product carbon footprinting for fashion and apparel brands. The combined entity now serves over 300 apparel and footwear brands – including Asket, GANNI, New Balance, On and The North Face – with a single dataset and methodology. The deal extends Carbonfact's coverage across the full product environmental workflow, from supplier data collection to LCA, compliance reporting and decarbonization planning.
Fashion's supply chain structure creates particular challenges for product-level carbon footprinting, with issues around:
- Methodological fragmentation.
PCF in fashion lacks a single dominant standard. Brands navigate a patchwork of approaches – such as PEFCR, ISO 14067 and the Higg Materials Sustainability Index – producing figures that are difficult to compare across products, suppliers or reporting periods. - Supplier data gaps.
The majority of fashion emissions occur in Tier 2 and Tier 3 of the supply chain, where suppliers rarely have the systems or incentives to share primary activity data. Most brands fall back on generic secondary emission factors that introduce significant uncertainty at precisely the point where the most impactful decisions are made. - Tool mismatch.
Generic carbon management platforms were built for enterprise GHG inventories, not SKU-level LCAs. Their emission factor libraries are broad but shallow, leaving brands to paper over gaps with manual workarounds that do not scale.
The combined Carbonfact-Vaayu merged platform brings together over 150,000 fashion-specific emission factors, coverage of 200+ textile processes and 650+ material categories across 144 countries, and primary energy data drawn from more than 7,000 textile factories collected through Carbonfact's supplier network. More broadly, the deal reflects a market where fashion firms are no longer willing to adapt industry-agnostic tools to their needs. Deep supply chain complexity, material-level emission factor requirements and an increasingly prescriptive regulatory environment have made industry-specific infrastructure a practical necessity. The Carbonfact-Vaayu deal is not an isolated move: in April 2026, Makersite announced the acquisition of SiGREEN, Siemens's PCF and supply chain data exchange platform, driven by the same underlying logic.
Over the next two years, a wave of regulations and initiatives will fundamentally reshape how fashion brands measure and report environmental impact – such as the Digital Product Passport (DPP), ESPR, French Eco-Score, CSRD, California’s SB 253 and the Empowering Consumers Directive (EmpCo) – all converging on the need for defensible, product-level environmental data. At the centre of this shift are LCAs, which provide the quantified impacts – carbon, water, energy, materials – that feed directly into DPPs, making them the foundational data layer for compliance. As a result, LCAs are emerging as the most practical starting point for DPP readiness: they create a standardized, reusable dataset across product portfolios, help brands structure supplier data and enable a ‘measure once, report everywhere’ approach that reduces compliance complexity.
In parallel, the LCA software market is rapidly converging, with vendors – including Carbonfact, GreenStitch, Green Story, Peftrust and Root Sustainability – expanding into DPP-aligned capabilities. This signals a clear trajectory towards integrated platforms where LCA generates product-level intelligence and DPPs deliver it across the value chain. These capabilities are emerging as fashion brands prepare for EU textile-specific delegated acts, expected to be adopted in 2027.
To learn more about how the software landscape is evolving in the PCF, LCA and DPP space, read the following reports:
About The Author
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Alessandra Leggieri
Senior Analyst
Jessie Wilson
Industry Analyst
