The label you copied is now your claim

How we work

Why we verify instead

Textile products sold in the United Kingdom must carry their fibre composition, and that composition must be accurate. It sounds like administrative detail until you follow where the liability sits. A retailer that takes a supplier's label and reproduces it in a listing has made that statement itself. If the garment is sixty per cent polyester and the label says cotton, the consumer's complaint and the regulatory breach belong to the shop that sold it, not to a factory in another country.

Almost every small retailer transcribes. It is the obvious thing to do, it costs nothing, and the error rate upstream is invisible until somebody tests a garment. We would rather verify what we can and be explicit where we cannot, which occasionally means not listing something because the supplier could not substantiate what they had printed. That is a slower way to build a range and a less exciting thing to put on a website.

The same instinct applies to sizing and to green claims, in both cases because the easy version misleads. There is no standard behind a UK dress size, so publishing the garment's own measurements is the only honest basis for buying online. And a garment is rarely wholly organic, recycled or low impact — usually one component is — so a claim has to say which part it covers and which scheme stands behind it. Both habits make listings longer and less reassuring. Both let a customer actually compare.