Welcome to the GOTS certification guide
a learning platform for shoppers and brand owners, built around a long-form interview with GOTS and the questions the public actually asks about organic cotton certification.
GOTS Organic Certification
The Questions, Answered by GOTS
Misinformation is dangerous, especially with something as important as the fabric you choose to buy and put on your skin, or sell to your customers. GOTS, the Global Organic Textile Standard, is the leading processing standard for textiles made from organic fibres.
It covers the whole chain, from the fibre to the dyes, the wastewater and the people who make your clothes, and it is backed by independent, third-party certification.
But phrases like “GOTS certified”, “made with organic” and “100% organic cotton” get used loosely, and that is exactly where shoppers and even brand owners get lost.
So Hold The Throne interviewed GOTS for almost two hours. We spoke with Jeffrey Thimm, GOTS’s specialist in organic production and fibre traceability, about what GOTS actually certifies, the Indian organic cotton scam, the label grades, how to verify a brand, regenerative organic cotton, why sustainable clothing costs what it does, and the new satellite and QR-code traceability tools GOTS is building.
We also put forward audience questions submitted through our Instagram stories.
Table of Contents
What is GOTS certification?
GOTS stands for the Global Organic Textile Standard. It is a textile processing standard: it governs how a textile is spun, knitted, woven, dyed and manufactured once organic fibre enters the supply chain, and it sets both environmental and social rules at every stage.
It is run by an independent non-profit, Global Standard, and enforced through third-party certification rather than self-reporting.
Does GOTS actually certify the organic cotton itself?
No, and this surprises most people. As Jeffrey put it: first off, we ourselves don’t certify organic cotton. GOTS picks up at the ginning stage, after harvest, when the seed and lint are separated.
It requires that the fibre coming in is already certified organic by a recognised agricultural body, then certifies everything that happens to it from there.
Which organic standards does GOTS accept? (USDA, EU, Indian organic)
GOTS recognises any organic agriculture standard approved under the IFOAM Family of Standards, the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, which lists roughly fifty-plus qualifying certifications. In practice that means the USDA National Organic Program, plus EU organic, Indian organic, Canadian organic and Chinese organic.
IFOAM sets the base minimum for traceability and quality control, and GOTS defers to that agricultural expertise. In the EU, GOTS will be accepted with any recognised organic agriculture input.
Is GOTS just for cotton, or any organic fibre?
Any organic fibre. GOTS can certify organic wool, hemp, silk, alpaca, jute and flax, not only cotton.
That said, cotton dominates: over 90% of GOTS goods are cotton, which is why most of the conversation, and most of the fraud risk, sits there.
What is the problem with conventional (non-organic) cotton?
It comes down to how it is grown. Conventional cotton is chemically intensive, heavy on pesticides and synthetic fertilisers, and in the United States it is among the most pesticide-consumptive crops grown. Producing synthetic fertiliser is also very carbon intensive.
Organic cotton avoids those inputs and is grown inside an ecologically friendly crop-rotation system rather than as a standalone commodity. The damage from conventional cotton, Jeffrey stressed, is holistic: it harms the soil and the wider ecosystem, not just the plant.
Is the cotton you wear toxic, and what about the farm workers?
Jeffrey was careful not to overstate hazard grades to the end consumer, but he pointed the question where it belongs: the people in the field.
Those pesticides are just as bad for humans as for smaller creatures, we just have a higher tolerance. It will not kill you immediately, but the long-term consequence is real, and the heaviest cost falls on farm workers, not shoppers.
Who actually inspects the factories? How GOTS auditing works
Global Standard, the non-profit, develops the standard and runs the three-year revision process with public and expert consultation.
It does not do the audits itself.
Instead, GOTS works through roughly 26 independent certification bodies around the world, who employ the trained auditors that carry out site visits to the facilities.
It is a Type 1 third-party system, the benchmark for credible voluntary sustainability standards.
Is GOTS certification legit? What happens when a brand breaks the rules?
GOTS calls violations non-compliances. A minor one, such as missing paperwork, triggers a small corrective action.
A major or critical one gets the company immediately banned and removed from the system until it proves everything is fixed.
And if fraudulent non-organic cotton is found to have entered a GOTS supply chain, every product made with it loses its GOTS status and is pulled. No conventional cotton is ever permitted in a GOTS good.
The Indian organic cotton scam: what GOTS found
This is the story behind the headlines. Whistleblowers tipped GOTS off that something was wrong, GOTS launched an internal investigation, and it published the findings on its own website.
That disclosure went on to inform the New York Times investigation that exposed the scale of the fraud.
GOTS banned a number of companies and, crucially, used the episode to rebuild its traceability from the farm up.
“We had some whistleblowers that informed us that there was something happening, and we launched quite an investigation internally. After that investigation, we published it on our website. That was actually one of the things that informed an important article from the New York Times.” — Jeffrey Thimm, GOTS
How many cotton farmers does GOTS trace? The scale problem
Enormous, and still being mapped. GOTS is expanding the registry globally across all organic fibres, but in India alone Jeffrey described almost 2,000 groups, and each group could have 500 to a thousand farmers, and each farmer could have one or more organic cotton fields.
That is the real scale of what “traceable” has to mean.
How is GOTS stopping the next fraud? Registry, satellites and QR codes
After the fraud, GOTS built a global fibre registry (originally a farm-to-gin registry for Indian cotton) to track organic fibre from the field.
It also launched a remote-assessment AI tool that uses European Space Agency satellite imagery plus machine learning to judge whether a field is actually growing cotton, and whether that cotton is likely organic.
On the consumer side, GOTS is developing QR-code traceability and digital product passports; Jeffrey had just seen a working example at the Naturetex farms in Egypt, where a QR code reveals the garment’s full journey.
Can the public see the farmer database?
Not yet. Because of data-protection rules, especially in the EU, the supplier and farmer database is not publicly viewable.
The origins of the fibres in any given GOTS good are traceable, but that tracing currently lives inside GOTS’s internal system rather than on a public page.
What does 100% GOTS mean? Label grades explained (70% vs 95%)
There is no single “GOTS certified”; there are label grades, and the percentage refers to organic fibre content. “Made with organic” requires a minimum of 70% organic fibre. The “organic” grade requires a minimum of 95%.
Both grades can apply to certified organic fibre or to in-conversion fibre (cotton from farms in the three-year switch to organic).
So “100% GOTS” is not really a grade; what you want to read is which of those two grades the product carries.
How can I verify if a clothing brand is really GOTS certified?
Every certified product carries its own individual GOTS label, and that label states the grade.
So the single most useful question to ask a brand is not “is it organic” but “what is the GOTS label grade?”
As Jeffrey noted, that matters more than the headline percentage, because the grade tells you what the whole product has been held to, not just the fibre.
Is “92% organic cotton, 8% spandex, GOTS certified” the right phrasing?
We showed Jeffrey a real listing: stretch leggings described as “92% organic cotton, 8% spandex” with the words “GOTS certified organic cotton.”
The key point he made: no conventional cotton is allowed in GOTS goods.
If a product is 95% cotton and GOTS certified, all of that cotton is organic or in-conversion; there is never a blend of organic and non-organic cotton.
The cotton itself is certified by the USDA, the EU or another IFOAM body, while GOTS certifies the textile. The wording you see on a label often blurs the two.
What does GOTS actually cover? Fibre, dyes, wastewater and workers
The organic fibre content is the foundation, but GOTS is deliberately holistic.
Jeffrey’s analogy: you can have a great organic potato, but once you fry it up and spice it up, who knows what else is in there,
and clothing is the same.
On top of the fibre, GOTS layers environmental criteria, social criteria and due-diligence (governance) criteria, now on its eighth revision.
The social side covers labour conditions, human rights, freedom of association and a healthy work environment, down to lighting and air quality.
The environmental side reaches into the dyes and the wastewater.
Regenerative organic vs organic cotton: GOTS’s view
Regenerative is the term everyone is reaching for right now, and Jeffrey was careful to separate “regenerative organic certified” from “regenerative versus organic.”
The short version: organic certification already sits inside an ecological, soil-first farming system, so much of what “regenerative” promises is built into credible organic standards rather than being a wholly separate thing.
We unpack his full answer, and where the two genuinely differ, in the deep dive.
Why is organic clothing so expensive? Does GOTS add cost?
GOTS’s stated philosophy is blunt: sustainability should not cost more.
As a non-profit it keeps its own fees to a minimum; Jeffrey cited a charge of around 180 per certified facility. In other words, the GOTS certification itself is not what makes an organic T-shirt expensive.
The cost sits in the farming, the smaller scale and the honest supply chain, not in the label.
Does GOTS allow formaldehyde?
No. GOTS prohibits highly hazardous chemicals across the processing chain, including formaldehyde and azo dyes that release carcinogenic compounds, alongside its bans on GMOs and child labour.
The restriction on toxic finishing chemistry is one of the reasons a GOTS label means more than a fibre claim alone.
How do I follow GOTS and check its fraud investigations?
Straight from the source: GOTS has a newsletter you can sign up for at globalstandard.org, and it publishes its fraud-investigation results and its public-consultation invitations there too.
If you want to keep up with bans and standard revisions as they happen, that is where to watch.
Jeffrey’s closing word: stay vigilant
“It is possible to be ethical in our fashion choices. But, as you importantly point out, we need to be vigilant as well, because there are those that would take advantage of us. There is fraud, so we do need to keep an eye open. But if we all work together, we can really make the system work.” — Jeffrey Thimm, GOTS