Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), every product sold in the EU must carry a Digital Product Passport (DPP), a persistent digital record containing the product’s provenance, materials, and environmental impact data. Arnur Sabet, Mikah Nelson, Natalia Juarez, and Michael Herrington are the four recent Master of Information Management and Systems alums behind Reform: a resale architecture solution that transforms brands’ DPP compliance infrastructure into an authenticated secondhand commerce experience, creating new value for brands, resale marketplaces, resellers, and buyers. Reform was awarded the James R. Chen Award for Spring 2026.
To learn more, we interviewed the team —
What inspired your project? How did you decide on the concept?
Michael: Reform grew out of earlier personal work on product identity and ownership infrastructure. I first came to the space through counterfeiting, which is often treated as a luxury problem but is much larger: it affects pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, electronics, food, and supply chains where trust has real economic and human consequences.
I saw counterfeiting less as a brand-protection issue and more as an infrastructure problem. Physical products often lack a trusted identity that can follow them across markets, owners, and resale channels. EU Digital Product Passport regulations created a forcing function, but the larger opportunity was a new commerce primitive: a trusted product record for authenticity, ownership, and resale. As Tobi Lütke has described, strong infrastructure is built as “infrastructure in the form of primitives.” Reform explored whether verified product identity could become that primitive, starting in luxury resale and eventually extending across physical commerce.
“The relationships you develop are one of the most valuable parts of the program because they lead to opportunities to build, learn, and create impact. Many of the lessons that will stay with me came from working through uncertainty, late nights, and ambitious ideas alongside my peers, capstone team, and excellent faculty members. Although the work eventually ends, the community carries on long afterward.”
What was the timeline or process like from concept to final project?
Michael: Although Reform became our capstone, the concept began about a year earlier through a commerce infrastructure company I was building independently on nights and weekends. Arnur and I tested early versions at San Francisco hackathons, and I traveled to blockchain conferences during the semester to explore technical models.
During my final year, research supervised by Professor Deirdre Mulligan on counterfeiting, governing identity bodies, and EU regulation pushed the idea away from pure blockchain toward a hybrid decentralized identity model. For capstone, our team focused Reform on resale as a concrete use case for brands, marketplaces, and consumers.
The original concept came from work I had been developing independently, but Reform became what it was through the team’s contributions: Natalia’s experience in e-commerce and law, Arnur’s background in compliance and payments tech, and Mikah’s expertise in privacy and user research.
How did you work as a team?
Arnur: Something that wasn’t visible in the final capstone is how deliberately we worked with AI. We treated it as a collaborator, not a shortcut, which meant we refused to ship slop. When a first output came back generic, we iterated until our own taste and judgment actually came through. We also invested early in workflows, automations, and context engineering so the boring, repetitive work handled itself, freeing us to spend our energy on the decisions that mattered. And we kept each other current: whenever something new dropped in the space, we’d share it and ask the same question, does this change how we should be building, and if so, how? That habit of staying curious together probably shaped the project as much as any single design decision.
Mikah: As the user experience (UX) researcher in the project, I was brought on a little bit later after the conception of the project. I was uncertain about how I’d be able to fit with a strong team of engineers and a product manager; however, the team welcomed me in and made sure to keep me clued in into the work that they had done, and then continued to do. While we made a couple pivots, the team made me feel super welcome and ultimately our divide-and-conquer approach made the product shine.
How did your I School curriculum help prepare you for this project? Which course in the program was uniquely helpful in preparing you for your capstone project and why?
Arnur: MIMS is an ideal program for anyone who wants to build something of their own; it gives you room to develop range across business, design, engineering, and even law. Specializing matters, but some of the most valuable growth for me came from taking classes outside my comfort zone.
The single most useful thing I did was an independent study with Michael on the AI software development lifecycle. It grounded us in a mindset of collaborating with AI effectively, not just using it, but building a real practice around it. We learned a tremendous amount there, and applied nearly all of it directly when building Reform.
Natalia: The interdisciplinary nature of the I School expanded my product craft and prepared me to take on the scope of our capstone project. Reform sits at the intersection of external regulatory pressure, business needs, complex information infrastructure, and shopper delight. To address these wide requirements, I informed my approach from several classes, including Lean/Agile Product Management, Information Law and Policy, UX for AI, Back-End Web Architecture, Leadership and Management, and Storytelling. I also incorporated lessons from beyond the I School, drawing on Haas’s Lean Launchpad and SCET’s AI and the Modern Data-driven Business Model. It’s impossible to single out one class because all of these courses prepared me to address unique facets of Reform’s scope. That diverse breadth is what makes the I School and MIMS so transformative. The freedom to engage with the best of Berkeley made me a stronger, more dynamic professional and product builder.
Mikah: The UX design class I took actually helped me a lot with understanding the design process from start to finish. Going through the full process of how a product is created by identifying the problem space and asking clarifying questions was a key part of this project. Working with a PM on my team was a crash course on its own for how UX researchers can work well with a product design team. The other UX research classes I took help to build my skills as a UX researcher helped inform our qualitative methods. MIMS is strong through its interdisciplinary classes because I also think that knowing how to code and understanding how systems thinking works helped to bring this project to life.
How could this project make an impact, or, who will it serve?
Natalia: Reform has significant potential to improve retail circularity, build stronger brand relationships, and drive more delight. In the wake of fast fashion trends, the textile and apparel industry has long been characterized as wasteful and attention-consuming. However, our project is driven by social and regulatory motivations to promote the longevity and circularity of physical products. Reform builds on the EU’s Digital Product Passport infrastructure to give every product a verified credential that travels with it through resale, carrying its provenance and ownership history across the marketplaces shoppers already use. Reform builds trust in resale, reducing the risk that prevents resellers and buyers from engaging in the secondhand market. Reform pairs this trust with delightful UX to power a new style of retail that benefits every stakeholder: brands, resale marketplaces, resellers, and shoppers.
Now that you’ve finished your capstone, what advice would you give yourself at the start of the program? What do you wish Day One you knew?
Arnur: A lot of people start the program with one goal: land a job at the end. That’s completely valid, but don’t let it crowd out the actual learning and the project work. Put real effort into everything you build, team projects and solo ones alike. That’s where you really learn, and it’s often where the unexpected opportunities show up, a role you didn’t know existed, or the realization that you’d rather start your own thing. None of that happens if you spend two years scrolling LinkedIn instead of building.
Natalia: I would advise anyone pursuing MIMS to invest deeply in the people around you. The relationships you develop are one of the most valuable parts of the program because they lead to opportunities to build, learn, and create impact. Many of the lessons that will stay with me came from working through uncertainty, late nights, and ambitious ideas alongside my peers, capstone team, and excellent faculty members. Although the work eventually ends, the community carries on long afterward. I’m incredibly grateful for the experience and for everyone who shaped it.
Mikah: I wish I had known not to be as afraid of how I might fit in or be on the same level as my peers. This is an interdisciplinary program, and everyone brings different skills sets to the table, including different perspectives to the design process, to organization and to creating a welcome environment to design, coding, or research projects. It’s important to remember that you will work with all kinds of people in this program and learning how to work with different people is key.
Anything else you’d like to share?
Arnur: I’m grateful to Michael, Natalia, and Mikah. Building Reform with this team was the highlight of the program for me. If there’s one thing I’d want a future student to take from our project, it’s that the tools change constantly, but taste, curiosity, and the willingness to keep iterating don’t go out of date.
