Sustainable fashion : part 2

Guillermo Ortega

Founder of Natural Vibes Clothing

What is the process of getting the GOTS certification?

They audit every part of the process, so they go to the factory. That’s the important part. But when they come to my office, I have a laptop, a printer, and he’s like: “Yeah”. I mean, they check that the boxes that I ship are recyclable, that everything that I ship to the costumer is organic and good. So that I’m not using certain harmful products, but yeah, it’s easy to pass.

Does having it help you attract more clients?

For me at the moment, because we are a small or medium sized brand, we need to gain the trust of the customer, so it’s good to have a certification that says: “OK you don’t know this brand, but they have a certificate and you can trust it.” For bigger brands, maybe you trust them more so they can have the processes and you can say: “OK, I go for this”. But for us it makes sense at the moment.

How did you find your suppliers?

The certification that we have, they have a public database that you can just search and after that you can contact the producer directly. They have a public database in which you can search for the country where you want to find producers, the category of cloth that you want to produce and they give you the address, everything.