gots audit Organic cotton custom T-shirts - eco embroidery & print - I Dress Myself

Menu

0

VIEW THE SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT CATALOGUE

I Dress Myself has been printing onto organic cotton T-shirts for fifteen years or so and can remember the first organic cotton styles from Continental Clothing and a time before Stanley/Stella even existed. Back then, there wasn't much choice - it was a 4 basic styles and a very limited colour range of black, white, grey or navy - and almost everyone thought we were crazy. Things have changed so much in terms of availability (we source more than a hundred different garment styles now in a hundred colours) and we've been very happy to see the shift in mindset too.

Sustainability is now quite rightly in the spotlight and brands and organisations are sourcing according to their values, rather than just on price. We've had a long time to get ahead of most print businesses and it was time for us to formalise some of the important working practices that we've put into place, by applying for GOTS certification.

Here we tell you a bit about our first GOTS audit, a two day affair checking through all the required policies, procedures, test result, training records and documentation.

This week we were audited for the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS). Not only did we pass but they upgraded us to include brand status too! All our processes can now be GOTS-certified: screen printing, DTG printing, embroidery and custom labelling. We are so pleased and proud.

One moment I won’t forget….on the second day of the audit our two auditors asked to talk about our wastewater calculations. I panicked! Had I got it wrong? Automatic fail? Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) is a measure of harmful chemicals and a critical part of GOTS certification. They asked to go check our calculations because they couldn’t believe it. I’d confidently (foolishly) taken the sample at a worst case scenario point, after a load of screen making, but the test result showed a COD value approx 6000 times better quality than GOTS requirements. The calculations were good though and our wastewater is beyond brilliant. This!

What a vindicator! A big part of the reason why we say no to plastisol inks and no to discharge printing. Water based pigment inks really are so much cleaner! Why would you use anything else?

GOTS requires the paperwork to be tight and we’ve been working hard behind the scenes: writing more policies, procedures for the policies, training for the procedures, training records for the training - it is a lot. But it felt great to pull together everything we do into one cohesive system..

Sustainability has been an IDM value since day dot and being scrutinised on this made me stupidly nervous but I needn’t have worried. We passed our audit with zero non-compliances and zero non-conformities - no concerns and nothing we needed to change in order to pass.

Thanks to our auditors Chanuk Bandara and Jibin George who were super helpful, professional and thorough. And of course to our team, who keep everything running smoothly so we can concentrate on our accreditation and generally levelling up.

Next stop……ISO14001