A working graph linking every SKU to materials, makers and origin — surfaced naturally inside the buying flow, never exiled to a virtue-signal page nobody visits. Auditable. Queryable. Refused where we cannot evidence the claim.
The single most common provenance mistake in commerce is the badge. A round green badge on the product card linked to a separate page that nobody opens. We do not do this. Provenance information appears inside the product description where it earns its place — the origin of the oak in a chair, the dye-house behind a textile, the specific atelier responsible for the assembly. Where the information is not interesting for that piece, it is simply not surfaced. The customer encounters relevance, not signposting.
For categories where provenance is a category-wide concern (sustainable fashion, food, wood objects, hand-made textiles), Trove Provenance also generates a brief, evidence-grounded summary at the top of the category page. The summary is short, specific, and silent on anything we cannot evidence.
The Provenance schema is open. Versioned, documented, available in the Library. We use it ourselves; we encourage merchants to use it directly when they import third-party data; we are entirely happy for competitors to use it. The point of an open schema is that the data outlives the platform, and the merchant's investment in provenance data is not held hostage to a vendor choice.
| Schema entity | Required fields | Verification |
|---|---|---|
| material | type, source_region, certification? | Direct, supplier-attested, inferred |
| maker | name, country, scale, relationship | Direct, public-registry, inferred |
| origin | raw_region, assembly_region, finish_region | Direct, customs-record, inferred |
| claim | statement, evidence_link, status | Verified, unverified, refused |
| audit_event | timestamp, actor, prior, posterior | Immutable log |
Provenance Schema v1.2 is the current version. Earlier versions are archived and remain queryable; migration tooling is included with the atelier slot.