From national teams to local clubs, Danish sportswear brand hummel has built its reputation on providing sportswear for athletes at every level. With its products worn by teams and players around the world, maintaining consistent quality across its global supply chain is essential to protecting the brand’s reputation and delivering on customer expectations.
With production spanning countries including China, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Egypt, hummel relies on close collaboration between inspectors, sourcing teams, and suppliers.
Mads Ranga Ewald, Group Sourcer & QA Responsible – Apparel at hummel, has helped transform how the company works with quality data. With Qarma, hummel has moved beyond simply documenting inspections to actively using the insights to improve production processes, strengthen supplier relationships, and make more informed decisions.
From spreadsheets to actionable quality data
Before Qarma, hummel’s inspectors carried out inspections using AQL standards and documented findings in spreadsheets, with photos attached to the reports.
While the process provided documentation, the collected information was rarely used beyond reviewing individual inspections or investigating quality issues.
“Before, we had a lot of Excel files. If there was something failing, we checked them, but otherwise we didn’t use them,” Mads explains.
Today, inspectors record their findings directly in Qarma’s mobile app, making it easier to document defects, attach photos, and share reports. The time they used to spend on spreadsheets now goes into checking products and improving processes.
The bigger change is what happens next. With every inspection in one place, hummel can filter by supplier, defect, product, or inspector and see patterns that were invisible before.
“The biggest change is definitely that we can now use all the data we’re collecting for something. We didn’t do that before.”
Turning supplier insights into improvements
For Mads, one of Qarma’s greatest advantages is the ability to turn inspection results into constructive conversations with suppliers.
Before visiting a factory, he reviews the supplier’s performance over the previous six months using Qarma’s dashboards. This allows him to identify recurring defects and bring concrete documentation into meetings with factory management and production teams.
Rather than addressing every issue at once, hummel focuses on the three most common defects, which often account for approximately 50% of all recorded issues.
Together with the supplier, the team sets improvement targets and uses Qarma to monitor progress over time. They set the goals, but he helps keep them realistic and accountable.
“If loose threads are [having a defect rate of] 34%, maybe they say 5%. I say: I like your attitude, but it needs to be realistic.”
They agree on a number, it goes into the meeting minutes, and hummel’s QCs report progress every two weeks. Once a defect is under control, they move on to the next one.
“It’s not about pointing fingers at our suppliers. It’s about showing them that we have a tool that can help them improve,” Mads explains.
Visual documentation plays an important role in these conversations, particularly when working across different countries and languages.
“What’s really valuable is that you can show them pictures. No matter what language you speak, everybody understands the picture.”
The approach helps suppliers identify where production processes need improvement, reducing unnecessary rework while strengthening accountability and collaboration.
Making quality part of sourcing decisions
Mads has helped ensure that hummel’s inspection data no longer stays with QA alone. Buyers and product developers have access to Qarma, get flagged reports for their brands, and now use the data to prepare their own supplier visits, so suppliers hear one consistent message from hummel. Mads is also encouraging them to weigh it alongside price:
“Maybe they give a good price, but if they fail a lot of inspections, it’s better to choose another one.”
hummel’s broader efforts to strengthen quality control are showing measurable improvements.
According to Mads, customer claims have decreased by 12%, while Qarma has helped reduce the administrative work involved in inspection reporting and made quality data more accessible across the organization.
Beyond the numbers, Mads sees the greatest value in preventing poor-quality products from reaching customers in the first place.
A defect can lead to additional costs, returns, or rework. But more importantly, it can affect customer trust and the likelihood of someone choosing the brand again.
By connecting inspection results with supplier development and sourcing decisions, hummel is building a quality process that focuses not only on identifying defects, but on preventing them.
From reactive to predictive quality control
For Mads, the next step is to use quality data even earlier in the production process, before defects have the chance to develop.
Today, many inspections take place at the final stage of production, when problems can already be costly and time-consuming to correct.
“Final inspection is often too late if something is found. I want to do more inline inspections,” Mads says.
His ambition is to use existing QC resources more strategically, spending less time inspecting consistently high-performing suppliers and directing more attention toward earlier production stages and areas with recurring quality issues.
He also sees opportunities to bring quality insights into product development. For example, if inspection data repeatedly shows problems with a particular neckline design, those findings could help product developers make adjustments before the next production run.
AI is another part of this development. hummel is exploring how Qarma’s AI Checkpoints can use historical inspection findings to highlight relevant quality risks and guide inspectors toward areas requiring additional attention.
Looking further ahead, Mads sees the potential for a more predictive approach, where quality data helps identify potential risks earlier and informs where inspections and improvements should be prioritized.
The objective is not necessarily to conduct more inspections, but to make each inspection more valuable.
“The main goal is to get better products and a more efficient business for our suppliers, our partners, and of course ourselves.”
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