Yes, in principle you can manage the digital product passport for textiles yourself. Nothing in the regulation compels you to engage a service provider. What is clear: responsibility for correct and complete data remains with you as the provider, whether you enter that data yourself, have it entered by a colleague, or outsource it to a platform. You cannot organize away that responsibility.
In practice, the issue is not whether you can do it yourself, but which part you do yourself. Gathering product information, knowing your own supply chain and checking what suppliers provide is every company's own responsibility, with or without external support. Technically assembling the passport, generating a working QR data carrier and keeping the data available for ten years is a different kind of work. You can do it yourself, but it requires a different set of skills than most SMEs have in-house.
What always remains with you
The core of your obligation is substantive: which fibres are in the garment, where was it made, which materials were used, how does repairability and recyclability stand. You obtain that data from your manufacturer, your fabric supplier or your own production process. No one else can take over that check for you, not even a service provider. A platform can process data into a passport, but cannot assess whether the fibre composition you supply is correct. That remains your check, and that is precisely why it is useful to know in advance which data will be needed. With a few questions you can already see where you stand, before anything is settled about the exact start date.
What can be outsourced
The technical side is a different matter. A passport must remain accessible for ten years via a QR code, even if your webshop changes supplier, your website is renewed or your company takes a different direction. That requires stable, independent hosting that does not move with your own IT projects. For most companies, that is precisely the part for which a specialized platform exists: not because doing it yourself is impossible, but because it is rarely efficient to set up your own hosting solution with long-term guarantees for a handful of products. How such a platform converts the data supplied into a passport can be read on the page on how the data is processed.
The boundary between doing it yourself and outsourcing
The practical boundary usually lies not in knowledge, but in time and continuity. Drawing up a passport yourself for a single collection is manageable. It becomes more difficult once you have multiple collections per year, multiple suppliers, or when the person who is handling it now no longer works for the company in a year's time. A ten-year obligation does not automatically survive a staffing change or a system update, unless that is deliberately arranged. That is a different issue than the substantive correctness of the data, and it is precisely where most companies run into problems: not the entering of data itself, but keeping what has been entered in existence for years.
If you are unsure whether managing it yourself is feasible, it is wise to first look at the scope: how many product lines, how many suppliers, how often does the collection change. For companies with a small and stable range, managing it yourself is quite doable, provided someone is structurally responsible. With a broader or changing assortment, the time investment often does not weigh against the cost of outsourcing. An overview of what different approaches cost is on the page with rates.
Where you can find out more about this
The regulation itself leaves considerable room for how a supplier manages its data, as long as the result meets the requirements. What this concretely means in your situation depends on your products and your chain, and only a lawyer or the competent supervisory authority can provide definitive guidance on this. For background information per topic, from data collection to retention period, there is the knowledge base with explanations per situation.
Would you like to first see how much work is involved in your case before you choose between doing it yourself and outsourcing? The free quick-scan provides a first indication in a few minutes, without any obligations.