Why GOTS Certified Textiles Matter for Your Home

If you read the label on a piece of textile and see the words “organic cotton,” what you actually know is this: somewhere along the supply chain, someone called it organic. That’s about it.

The certification that closes that gap is called GOTS. It’s the most comprehensive textile certification in the world. And it’s why we put it on everything we make at Myyra.

This piece is for anyone choosing home linen and wondering whether the certifications on the label actually mean anything. Most don’t. GOTS does. Here’s why.

What is GOTS?

GOTS stands for the Global Organic Textile Standard. It’s an international certification that traces and verifies a textile’s entire supply chain — from the farm where the cotton is grown all the way through to the finished product on a shop shelf. To carry the GOTS label, every link in the chain has to comply.

That includes:

• The farm where the fibre is grown (must be certified organic)
• The ginning of the cotton (no contamination with conventional cotton)
• The spinning and weaving (no toxic chemicals, no forbidden processing aids)
• The dyeing (no banned dyes, no heavy metals, no carcinogenic compounds)
• The printing (only GOTS-approved pigments, no PVC, no banned solvents)
• The cutting and stitching (the actual workshop must be certified)
• The labour conditions (fair wages, no child labour, freedom of association)
• The packaging (no banned materials)

Every step is audited annually by a third-party body. Every single link in the chain has to renew its certificate every year. If even one supplier fails the audit, the whole chain loses certification until it’s fixed.

Why ordinary “organic cotton” isn’t enough

The word “organic” on a textile label only refers to how the cotton was farmed. It says nothing about what happens to that cotton after it leaves the field.

An “organic cotton” bedsheet might have been:

• Spun in a mill that also processes conventional cotton, with cross-contamination
• Bleached with chlorine or hydrogen peroxide using banned heavy metals
• Dyed with azo dyes that are illegal in the EU because they release carcinogens during washing
• Stitched in a factory paying below-minimum wages

And it would still be sold as organic cotton.

GOTS is what closes those holes. The whole chain, audited.

What does GOTS mean for the cotton you actually sleep on?

If a sheet, duvet cover, or shirt carries GOTS certification, here’s what you can assume:

No toxic residues. The dyes, finishes, and printing pigments used are tested and verified to not contain compounds that are toxic on skin contact or off-gas into the air. This matters more than people realise — you spend roughly a third of your life in contact with your bedding.

No microplastics from finishes. GOTS prohibits the synthetic anti-wrinkle and softener finishes that release microplastics during washing.

The fibre is genuinely organic. Traceability means the cotton in your sheet was actually grown without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or GMOs — not just labelled that way.

The people who made it were treated fairly. Wages, working hours, child labour, and freedom of association are all part of the audit.

GOTS isn’t the loudest certification. It’s the most thorough.

What GOTS certification actually takes — the Myyra story

In 2012, our team became the world’s first to receive GOTS certification for hand block printed textiles. It took a year and a half of work. Here’s a partial list of what we had to change:

• Source organic cotton fabric from GOTS-certified mills only (cutting our supplier list significantly)
• Replace every commercial pigment with GOTS-approved alternatives — some prints had to be reformulated entirely
• Train every printer in our workshop on the new colour palette
• Coach our wood-block carvers on the small adjustments needed for the new pigment chemistry
• Build separate, segregated inventory storage so GOTS fabric couldn’t be cross-contaminated with conventional
• Document every wash, every dye, every printing batch — full traceability records
• Get our finishing and stitching workshops independently audited
• Audit our wages, working hours, and labour practices

Most of these weren’t changes we wanted to make — they were changes we had to make. But the work changed how an entire cluster of Jaipur block-printing workshops thought about supply chains. Other workshops followed. The certification raised the floor for the whole community.

How to spot real GOTS — and why brands fudge it

GOTS-certified products carry a logo and a unique certification number that you can verify on the GOTS website. If a brand says “GOTS-certified cotton” but the finished product doesn’t carry the number, that’s a red flag. The fibre may be GOTS but the rest of the chain isn’t. That’s technically allowed but misleading.

Look for one of three things on the label:

• “GOTS — Organic” (95%+ certified organic fibre)
• “GOTS — Made with Organic” (70%+ certified organic fibre)
• The certification number, which you can search at global-standard.org

Why this matters for the planet (briefly)

Cotton uses a quarter of the world’s pesticides while occupying about 2.5% of the world’s arable land. Conventional cotton dyeing is one of the largest sources of industrial water pollution globally. The textile industry is one of the most polluting industries on earth.

GOTS is what shifts a piece of that industry toward something that doesn’t poison the soil, the water, or the people who make the cloth.

It’s also, frankly, what lets us sleep at night — literally. We make bedding, after all.

Where to start

Every piece of home linen we make at Myyra is hand block printed on GOTS-certified organic cotton. If you’d like to see the range — bed linen, cushion covers, table linen, kitchen linen — you can browse our collections online. Direct from our Jaipur workshop, no middlemen, ships worldwide.