Our research is open: The State of Post-Purchase Commerce 2026

We're studying what actually happens to a product after it's sold — and we need brands and consumers to help us find out.

Every fashion product sold into the EU will soon carry a Digital Product Passport. Most of the industry is treating that as a compliance milestone. We think it's something else: the first real chance to understand what happens to a product after someone buys it — because right now, almost nobody does.

That's the gap The State of Post-Purchase Commerce 2026 is built to close. It's our flagship research report, and it's built on two open interviews running in parallel:

• For brands — we're asking what happens after checkout today: how you track (or lose) a product once it leaves the warehouse, what resale and repair currently cost you, and where your customer relationship actually ends.
• For consumers — we're asking what owning something is really like: how you care for what you buy, what you do with it when you're done, and what would make you keep a product rather than replace it.

Why we're doing this

Nobody has published a serious, product-level dataset on what happens after the sale. Brands are making multi-year infrastructure decisions about Digital Product Passports based on regulation timelines, not on evidence of what would actually make those systems worth using. Consumers are living the resale-and-repair reality every day, and nobody's asked them to describe it in their own words.

We're publishing the findings openly, with brand and consumer voices credited (with permission), because the industry can't fix a problem it hasn't measured.

Take part

If you're a brand: your answers shape how the report frames what “good” post-purchase infrastructure looks like — and you'll get early access to the findings before public release.

If you're a consumer: your answers shape what we build. This is the closest thing to a design brief for the next decade of how products should work after you own them.

The State of Post-Purchase Commerce 2026 publishes later this year. This is where it starts.

Patina is the operating system for a product's life after purchase.