Textile certifications carry different weight. OEKO-TEX and GOTS are the two that EU procurement teams routinely require — both are independently audited and expensive to fake. Below: what each certification actually verifies, the tier hierarchy that buyers ask about, the cycle on which they get re-audited, and what Fabrixa carries today.
OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 · GOTS · EU AUDIT-READY
Different products in the catalogue carry different cert combinations — apparel and bedding hold the strictest tier; outdoor synthetics carry product-appropriate certifications. Each product page lists what applies to that SKU. Here’s the summary.
Applied to apparel cotton, kidswear cotton, and bedding cotton bases. Class I is the strictest tier in the certification — the same one applied to babywear sold under three years old. Limits over 300 individual chemical residues to levels far below regulatory thresholds.
Applied to organic cotton bases used across apparel and home textiles. GOTS verifies the chain of custody from organic farming through to finished textile, including labour and chemistry standards at every processing stage.
Outdoor poly-acrylic cushions, microfiber shower curtains, and other synthetic-substrate items hold OEKO-TEX Standard 100 at the product-appropriate tier — verified against the chemical limits for the use case.
OEKO-TEX Standard 100 verifies that a textile contains residual chemicals only below specified limits across hundreds of substances — pesticides, heavy metals, formaldehyde, allergenic dyes, carcinogenic compounds, phthalates. The limit thresholds depend on the product class, which depends on how the textile contacts the human body.
Re-audit cycle is annual. The certificate references on Fabrixa shipments resolve to the live registry where you can verify they’re currently active.
| Tier | Use case | Restriction level | Where Fabrixa applies it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Class I | Babywear, articles for under-3 wear | Strictest — lowest residual limits | Kidswear (mandatory by use case); apparel and bedding cotton bases (we apply Class I as our default) |
| Class II | Articles in skin contact (apparel, bedding) | Strict | Used by other producers as the apparel default; we deliberately apply Class I instead |
| Class III | Articles without skin contact (curtains, decor) | Moderate | Curtains, decorative cushions on synthetic bases — product-appropriate tier |
| Class IV | Decorative material (upholstery, wall coverings) | Lower | Not used on Fabrixa products — everything skin-adjacent or higher |
GOTS is the world’s most widely-recognised organic-textile certification. It verifies that the textile contains a minimum proportion of certified-organic fibre (95% for “organic” label, 70% for “made with organic”) AND that every processing stage in between — spinning, weaving, dyeing, printing, finishing, cut-and-sew — meets defined environmental and social criteria.
Re-audit cycle is annual. Every facility in the supply chain holds its own GOTS certificate; the chain of custody documentation on every shipment resolves to those individual facility certificates.
Procurement teams often see a forest of certification logos with overlapping claims. Quick orientation on the most common ones — what each one actually verifies, where it overlaps with OEKO-TEX or GOTS, and where it adds something distinct.
| Certification | What it verifies | Audit cycle | Used by Fabrixa |
|---|---|---|---|
| OEKO-TEX Standard 100 | Chemical residual limits in finished textiles | Annual | Yes — default across the range, Class I on apparel and bedding |
| OEKO-TEX Made in Green | Combines Standard 100 + Sustainable Production audit | Annual | Available on request for specific SKU lines |
| OEKO-TEX STeP | Sustainable Textile Production at facility level | Three years | At our Portuguese print partner’s facility |
| GOTS | Organic content + social and environmental processing standards | Annual | Yes — on organic cotton apparel and bedding bases |
| GRS (Global Recycled Standard) | Recycled content with chain of custody | Annual | Not currently — recycled-content lines on roadmap |
| BCI (Better Cotton Initiative) | Improved farming practices on conventional cotton | Various | Not used — we go to GOTS on the cotton we use |
| BLUESIGN | Chemical management at production-facility level | Annual | Not directly — OEKO-TEX + STeP cover the same ground |
| EU Ecolabel | EU-administered environmental performance label | Three–four years | Available on specific SKU programs — talk to sales |
Plenty of textile producers cite certifications they don’t actually hold — or hold one tier and claim a higher one. These three checks take ten minutes and tell you whether a certificate claim is real.
OEKO-TEX and GOTS both have public registries. Every active certificate has a unique number that resolves to the live entry — product, facility, expiry date, restriction level. If the supplier can’t produce a number that resolves, the claim isn’t real.
Certificates expire annually (most common). A 2022 certificate cited in 2026 doesn’t cover today’s production. Always check the certificate is currently valid for the production batch you’re receiving.
A facility-level STeP certificate doesn’t mean every product the facility ships meets Standard 100. A Class III certificate doesn’t cover skin-contact apparel. Read the certificate scope, not just the brand of the certificate.
Fabrixa shipments include the certificate references resolved against the live registries — not just logo claims. ESG and procurement teams can verify against the public entries directly.
Procurement teams evaluating Fabrixa as a supplier can request the full certification documentation — OEKO-TEX certificates, GOTS chain-of-custody refs, supplier audit trail — before placing the first order. We send the pack within 48h.
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