If your supplier hands you a GOTS certificate or an OEKO-TEX label number, typing “GOTS certified” into your passport’s certifications field feels like the job is done. It usually isn’t quite. A certifications section on a Digital Product Passport is meant to hold something a customer, a marketplace or a regulator could actually check — and that takes a few more fields than the badge alone.
A logo isn't evidence — a licence number is
Both schemes covered here — GOTS and OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 — are genuine third-party certifications with real evidence behind them. The weak point is almost never the certificate itself; it’s how thinly it gets represented once it reaches a product page. “GOTS certified organic cotton” with nothing else attached is exactly the kind of unbacked claim that EU rules on green claims are starting to take a harder line on — not because the claim is false, but because there’s no way to check it without emailing the brand.
What GOTS actually certifies
GOTS (the Global Organic Textile Standard) certifies the organic origin and processing of fibres — not the finished product’s safety, and not the brand’s ethics in general. There are two label grades a product can carry, based on how much of the fibre content is certified organic:
A GOTS Scope Certificate is issued by a GOTS-approved certification body, naming the supplier, the specific scope of what’s certified, and a validity period that’s not meant to run longer than a year from issue. Anyone can check a licence number against GOTS’s own public database — though GOTS itself recommends confirming directly with the issuing certifier if anything looks off, since a database entry alone isn’t treated as definitive proof.
What OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 actually certifies
This is where mixing the two schemes up causes real problems. OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 certifies something unrelated to organic content: that the finished textile has been laboratory-tested against a defined list of harmful substances — colourants, heavy metals, formaldehyde and others — and passed the limits set for its product class. It has nothing to say about whether the fibres are organic, recycled, or conventional cotton grown with pesticides.
OEKO-TEX licences also run about a year at a time, and its own Label Check tool lets anyone enter a label or certificate number and see its validity, product class and scope directly from OEKO-TEX.
What actually belongs in the certifications field
For each certification on a product, five things turn a logo into something checkable:
- Certifying body and scheme. “GOTS” or “OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100”, plus who issued the specific certificate — GOTS accredits multiple approved certification bodies, it isn’t one single issuer.
- Grade or class. GOTS’s Organic or Made with Organic; OEKO-TEX’s product class (I–IV).
- Licence or certificate number. The specific identifier that lets anyone look the certificate up on the issuer’s own site, rather than take your word for it.
- Scope. What part of the product it actually covers — the whole garment, just the outer fabric, or just the trims. Composite products (a cotton shirt with polyester buttons) rarely have every component certified.
- Validity dates. Both schemes recertify roughly annually — an expired number returns nothing on either verification tool, which is an easy thing for a customer to discover and an awkward one to explain.
A one-time checklist for gathering this from a supplier
If you don’t already have this on file, it’s usually one email away — factories that hold these certifications keep the paperwork for their own audits, so you’re asking them to share it, not produce it from scratch.
- Ask for the actual Scope Certificate or STANDARD 100 certificate PDF, not just a logo file.
- Note the licence or certificate number exactly as printed — case matters on OEKO-TEX’s Label Check.
- Check the certificate's stated scope against your specific product, not the factory’s whole output.
- Run the number through the issuer’s own verification tool before you publish it.
- Set a reminder around the certificate’s expiry date — roughly a year out — to ask for the renewed one.
Where this fits on productpasses.com
The editor’s Certifications section is built for exactly this — structured entries rather than a single free-text line, so a licence number and validity date have somewhere to live next to the scheme name. If you hold a certification we haven’t built a dedicated field for, a custom section covers it with the same fields you choose to add.
One honesty note: like every section on a public passport, certifications carry the same “self-declared” disclaimer as the rest of the page. We give you the structure to enter a certificate properly; we don’t independently check it against the issuing body’s database on your behalf. That verification step — a minute or two on GOTS’s database or OEKO-TEX’s Label Check — is still yours to do before you publish.