100% GOTS-certified organic cotton, grown without synthetic pesticides or fertiliser, on farms that build soil instead of stripping it.
A single conventional t-shirt takes about 2,700 litres of water to produce — roughly what one person drinks in two-and-a-half years. The shirts we sell take less than half that. Here's how.
The shirt you’re not wearing
Cotton covers about 2.5% of the world’s arable land. It also consumes around 16% of all insecticides used in agriculture and 4% of all synthetic fertilisers — a chemical load wildly out of proportion to its acreage.
That load doesn’t stay on the farm. It drifts into waterways, settles in soil, and ends up in the lungs of the people picking the crop. In the regions where most of the world’s cotton grows — India, China, the US, Pakistan — those are also the regions already struggling with water stress.
A single conventional t-shirt takes roughly 2,700 litres of water to produce, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. That’s a person’s drinking water for two-and-a-half years, soaked into one garment that might last two summers before it ends up at the back of a drawer.
That’s the default. That’s what the global supply chain ships every day. We picked a different default.
of water in a single conventional t-shirt — about what one person drinks in two-and-a-half years
Not a marketing word. A certification.
“Organic cotton” without a certification is a label, not a guarantee. We use GOTS-certified cotton — the Global Organic Textile Standard, which audits the whole chain from the seed in the ground to the seam in the finished shirt.
To carry the GOTS label, every fibre has to be:
- Grown from non-GMO seed
- Cultivated without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilisers
- Processed without prohibited chemicals (chlorine bleach, formaldehyde, aromatic solvents)
- Made in factories that meet documented labour and wage standards
GOTS auditors visit. Records are kept. The certification can be revoked. It’s not a sticker — it’s a chain of custody.
That matters because most “natural” or “eco” claims on apparel don’t survive any audit at all. The brands using them haven’t lied, exactly — they’ve just left the words deliberately undefined.
Soil that’s alive when you’re done with it
Our cotton is grown on farms in Northern India that work with the season instead of around it.
Rainwater harvesting captures monsoon water in field-edge ponds, reducing the draw on aquifers that are already over-tapped. Crop rotation with pulses and oilseeds fixes nitrogen in the soil so synthetic fertiliser isn’t needed. Insect traps — pheromone lures and physical barriers — replace the broad-spectrum pesticides that kill pollinators along with pests.
The soil ends each season healthier than it started. That’s the real difference. Healthy soil holds more water, needs less irrigation, and grows fibre that’s longer and softer because the plant wasn’t stressed.
According to research compiled by GOTS and the Textile Exchange, organic cotton uses around 1,100 litres of water per t-shirt — less than half the conventional figure. Most of that reduction comes from improved soil structure, not from skimping; healthy soil is its own reservoir.
of water in an organic-cotton t-shirt — a 59% reduction versus conventional
So what is the shirt?
When the cotton arrives at the factory in India, it goes through ginning (separating fibre from seed), carding (combing the fibres into one direction), spinning (twisting them into yarn), and knitting (working the yarn into jersey).
At each stage, GOTS requires that the organic fibre stays segregated — no commingling with conventional cotton, even on shared machinery. The dyes are low-impact and screened against the OEKO-TEX Standard 100, which means every component of the finished garment has been tested for more than 300 harmful substances.
The shirt you end up wearing carries none of the chemicals that linger in cheaper cotton. The labour that made it was paid against documented wage standards. And the cotton itself can, at the end of the shirt’s life, be fed back into the loop — recovered, shredded, blended with fresh cotton, and rewoven. (More on that in The Remill loop.)
It’s the same kind of t-shirt people have always worn. It just has a different story behind it.
