A small brand’s guide to sustainability certifications

What GOTS, OEKO-TEX, B Corp, LWG, RWS, RCS and GRS actually mean – and how to decide which ones make sense for your brand.

By Sophie Benson

If you’re running a brand, with the myriad different tasks and priorities that demands, deciding which certifications to incorporate – if any – can likely feel pretty daunting. With so many brands still making unsubstantiated claims about ethics and sustainability, from purporting to use environmentally-friendly fabrics without saying what makes them greener to claiming their clothes are ‘clean’ or ‘skin-friendly’ without providing scientific proof, certifications can offer an avenue to differentiate from the greenwashers and back up claims with third party verification. But there are a lot of them (and the number keeps growing), many of them overlap in some ways, and they all have different rules and expectations. Knowing which ones are meaningful can be difficult to weigh up and knowing how to get them is another headache.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be complicated. Many certifications are supply chain-focused, so you don’t have to gain certification yourself, you just have to source certified materials, which can be as easy as having a conversation with a supplier. In that case, the main job is understanding which certifications are right for your brand. There are no hard and fast rules on which are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It’s more about asking questions like which ones would your customers recognise, which ones support your values and narrative, and which ones can you afford?

Here, we dig into some of the certifications and standards you’re most likely to come across, what they mean, and how to navigate the pros and cons.

The certifications

GOTS

Global Organic Textile Standard, or GOTS, is the most prominent certification for textiles made from organic fibres such as cotton, linen, wool, and silk. Its ‘organic’ and ‘organic in-conversion’ (when the supply chain is transitioning to organic practices) labels mean products contain a minimum of 95% certified organic or organic in-conversion fibres, while its ‘made with organic materials’ and ‘made with organic in-conversion’ labels require from 70%-95% certified fibre content.

“It is a processing standard for organic textiles that follows the material from fibre through to the finished product, with strict environmental and social requirements along the way,” says Juliane Ziegler, representative to global brands at Global Standard. At the very start of the chain, only organic fibres can be used, meaning they’re not genetically modified and no harmful pesticides, herbicides, or synthetic fertilisers have been used. From there, the fibre is followed and checked throughout the supply chain to check that no hazardous chemicals are added, wastewater is properly treated to prevent pollution, and human rights are upheld. It’s not perfect, and GOTS has uncovered fraud in its system in the past. It tightened its scrutiny in the following years and now bans those found to be involved in fraudulent transactions.

GOTS is supply chain-focused, so the only time a brand would need to be certified is if you become part of the supply chain – if you’re buying fabric and then sending it on to a factory, or if you open a garment and relabel it, for instance. In that case, it will cost between £1000 and £2500 and will require an inspection and the submission of select documentation such as an environmental policy.