Gather wanted each furniture product to carry a durable, transparent record of its materials, makers, certifications and production journey. The starting point was a broad provenance concept, not a settled software specification.
The problem
A digital product passport only becomes trustworthy if the team can create and maintain the underlying record during normal operations. Gather needed to collect evidence from suppliers and makers, move products through production stages, correct records when necessary and publish a customer-readable history.
I worked directly with the team to understand where information entered the process, which stages mattered internally and what a customer should eventually see.
What I built
I translated that workflow into a full-stack system with:
- an internal application for creating digital product passports;
- structured records for materials, makers and certifications;
- a workflow for moving products through production stages;
- customer-readable provenance views;
- authentication and access control with Clerk;
- MongoDB-backed operational records;
- selected Base records for durable provenance.
The customer application was built with Next.js and delivered for a pilot.
Where reality disagreed
The early concept placed blockchain near the centre of the product. Working through the real production process revealed that most of the difficult work happened elsewhere: assembling evidence, deciding who could update it, correcting records and making the workflow usable by the team.
The ledger could provide a durable anchor for selected facts. It could not make the operational data accurate or persuade people to maintain it.
The durable record mattered, but only after the day-to-day workflow made it practical to create accurate provenance data.
How I investigated it
The evidence came from customer discovery, workflow mapping and successive prototypes with Gather’s team. I traced how a product moved from materials and makers through production to a published passport, then tested where the proposed data model or interface failed to match that process.
Experience from Origin Thread also provided a concrete comparison. That founder product had already exposed the gap between an interesting provenance idea and a system a business could operate repeatedly.
What changed
The architecture separated operational records from the smaller set of facts worth anchoring on-chain. The internal workflow became the core of the product. Blockchain became one component serving provenance, rather than the interface or organising principle for every action.
The product scope also shifted towards the people maintaining the record: structured inputs, production status and access control came before the customer-facing passport.
What I learned
In this system, trust came from the combination of a usable operational workflow and a durable published record. The technology that made provenance tamper-resistant was secondary to the process that made the data accurate.
This changed how I approach customer engineering: map who creates and corrects the data before choosing where that data should ultimately live.