The short answer
The textile regulation links the digital product passport to placing a product on the market. Once the obligation for your product category takes effect, in practice no passport means a product does not meet the conditions to be sold within the EU. What that means in a concrete case depends on national implementation and on the competent authority at that time. The regulation itself works this out at Union level; how an individual country controls this and what steps are involved is up to the Member States and the competent authorities they designate.
Important to distinguish: the date on which this obligation for clothing takes effect is not yet fixed. The ESPR work plan mentions 2027 for the delegated act, with clothing of eighty percent or more textile fibres as the first category, and 2029 as an indication for the market. As long as that act has not been published, there is also no moment at which 'not in time' actually takes effect. That does not change the fact that it is useful to know roughly what is coming your way, so that you do not have to improvise shortly before a deadline.
What the regulation describes regarding compliance
The regulation itself addresses the obligation to have a passport, who is responsible for it and what data it must contain. It does not describe, and it is important to know this, a fixed amount of fines or a fixed procedure per country. Those choices lie with enforcement in the Member States. The Netherlands must, like other Member States, arrange itself which competent authority will control this and what sanctions are appropriate. At the time of writing this has not yet been worked out in national legislation, simply because the underlying delegated act for textiles does not yet exist.
What is established is the principle behind the regulation: a product without the required information does not meet the conditions to be placed on the market. That is a different situation from a fine after the fact; it affects the possibility of selling the product. For a company that produces, imports or sells under its own brand, that is a reason not to see it as a paper formality, but as something that is linked to the moment a collection goes to market.
Who is affected in practice
In practice this does not only affect the party that should have created the passport. Retailers and wholesalers who purchase products can be faced with suppliers who cannot yet provide a passport. A chain in which one party is waiting for another is the scenario that causes the most time loss. Anyone who is dependent on a supplier further down the chain would therefore be wise to ask in time who in that chain will provide the data and who will maintain it. investigated per subject who in the chain is responsible for what provides a starting point for this, without you having to work through the full text of the regulation yourself.
What makes this different from a regular administrative obligation
With many administrative rules a brief breach is a matter of updating and moving on. With this passport that is slightly different, because the data often does not lie in one place: fibre composition, origin, care instructions and documentation on production conditions come from different links in the chain. Discovering a shortage at the moment when the obligation already applies is considerably more difficult to resolve than mapping it out well in advance. That is also why oversight of this type of obligation typically does not appear suddenly: there is a period of notification and preparation beforehand, precisely as is now happening with the ESPR work plan.
What you can already do without waiting for the final date
You can already check which data you have, which you still need to request from suppliers, and which system or party will host and display it via a QR code. That work does not have to wait for the delegated act; the basic information on fibres, origin and composition will not change through that act. With a few questions see where your company stands you get an initial, non-binding picture without having to work everything out immediately. Anyone who wants to know how such a passport is precisely compiled and hosted, reads that on the page about how the information is compiled.
Finally
The precise consequences of a missing passport depend on legislation that does not yet exist for textiles, and on how the Netherlands and other Member States will implement it. For your own company's situation, and for questions about liability, the competent supervisory authority or a lawyer is the right place to clarify that concretely; this article is not a substitute for that. Would you like an idea of your own position in advance, without obligations? Do the free quick-scan or browse the topics in the knowledge bank to see what will specifically apply to your product group.