Compliance · How to
OEKO-TEX, GOTS, SMETA, BSCI: what apparel certifications actually cover
Every supplier waves certificates; few buyers know what each one actually certifies. The three questions a certification can answer — is the product safe, what is it made of, how is the factory run — and which to ask for in which situation. Including an honest note on where we stand.
Founder, Trishakti Apparel 3 min read
Certification acronyms get thrown around apparel sourcing like confetti — OEKO-TEX, GOTS, SMETA, BSCI, WRAP, GRS. Here’s the thing most suppliers won’t tell you: they don’t certify the same kind of thing at all. Each one answers exactly one of three questions, and knowing which is which protects you from both missing paperwork and impressive-looking paperwork that doesn’t cover what you think it covers.
Question 1: Is the product chemically safe?
OEKO-TEX Standard 100 answers this one. It tests the finished textile — fabric, thread, trims — against limits for harmful substances, in many cases stricter than the legal limits under EU REACH, with the strictest class covering babywear. It was founded in 1992 by textile institutes in Germany and Austria, which is why German-speaking buyers treat it as the default ask. Crucially: it certifies the material, not the factory’s ethics — a certified fabric says nothing about who sewed it or how they were treated. OEKO-TEX Made in Green is the bigger sibling: product safety plus traceability into certified facilities.
Question 2: What is it made of?
GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard, founded 2002, headquartered in Stuttgart) certifies that a textile is made from certified organic fibre and that every processing stage — spinning, knitting, dyeing, sewing — meets its environmental and social criteria, with an unbroken chain of custody. That chain is the point: an “organic cotton” claim without chain-of-custody certification is just a purchase order for organic yarn somewhere upstream. GRS (Global Recycled Standard) does the same job for recycled content. These are material-claim certifications — they exist so a brand can print “organic” or “recycled” on a label and prove it.
Question 3: How is the factory run?
This is the social-audit family, and the vocabulary matters. SMETA is not a certificate at all — it’s an audit format run through the Sedex platform: an auditor spends days in the factory checking labour standards and health & safety (the “2-pillar” audit), or those plus environment and business ethics (“4-pillar”), and the report is shared with buyers, usually with a corrective-action plan attached. amfori BSCI is similar — an audit and improvement system against a code of conduct, favoured by continental European buyers — and also not a pass/fail certificate. WRAP, common with US buyers, is a genuine certification. Retailers and big wholesalers typically set one of these as a hard gate: no audit report, no purchase order.
Which to ask for, in which situation
| You are… | Ask the factory for | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Reselling blanks or private label in the EU/UK | OEKO-TEX Standard 100 (fabric level) + fibre-content documentation | Covers chemical safety and your labelling obligations |
| Making claims: “organic” / “recycled” | GOTS or GRS chain-of-custody through to the garment | Without the chain, the claim is unprovable |
| Selling babywear or kidswear | OEKO-TEX Class I materials + childrenswear safety compliance | Stricter chemical limits; design rules apply too |
| A retailer, chain, or their supplier | SMETA or BSCI audit report, recent, with CAP status | This is the standard onboarding gate |
Where we stand — stated plainly
Our policy is to tell buyers exactly where we are rather than decorate the website with badges. Today: we can supply OEKO-TEX certified fabric on request, with the mill’s certificate passed through to you, alongside full fibre and processing documentation. A formal social audit (Sedex/SMETA) sits at the top of our compliance roadmap — ask us and we’ll tell you the current status and timeline honestly, because a buyer who audits us will find exactly what we described. Our compliance page keeps the current picture.
A certificate is compressed trust — it lets a stranger skip months of verification. But it only works if you know what it certifies. The most dangerous supplier is the one whose impressive certificate answers a different question than the one you needed answered.
More on the ethics side in the questions to ask any factory, or ask us directly — we answer certification questions with documents, not adjectives.
About the author
Santosh Rijal runs Trishakti Apparel, the export knitwear factory his family built on three decades in Nepal’s fashion trade. He writes about sourcing, duty and production from the factory floor in Gaindakot.