What our clothes are made of: the label truth report (Sept 2026)
On 17 September 2026 we ran a script over every active clothing product in our catalogue and asked one question of each: do we hold a full fibre composition for this garment? This is the answer, in full, including the parts that make us look bad.
The headline numbers
Products examined: 1,441 active clothing products. Date of the scan: 17 September 2026.
| What the page states | Products | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Every fibre named, with a percentage | 920 | 63.8% |
| Fibres named, no percentages | 254 | 17.6% |
| No fibre information at all | 205 | 14.2% |
| Percentages given but they do not add up | 62 | 4.3% |
| Not a complete, checkable composition | 521 | 36.2% |
So we hold a full fibre composition for just under two thirds of the clothing we sell, and not for just over a third. On 521 products a shopper cannot find out what they are buying, because we do not know either. That is the first finding.
The second is worse in one respect. For most of the 920 we can account for, the composition sits in a supplier data field that our product template does not currently print on the page. The data exists and the shopper still cannot see it. Both gaps are counted as gaps here, and the second one is ours alone to fix.
What the 920 measurable garments are made of
These figures cover only the 920 products with a full composition. We cannot classify the other 521, and we do not guess at them.
| Group | Products | Share of the 920 | Share of all 1,441 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 80% synthetic or more | 451 | 49.0% | 31.3% |
| 50% to 79% synthetic | 87 | 9.5% | 6.0% |
| Under 50% synthetic | 312 | 33.9% | 21.7% |
| Natural or semi-synthetic only | 70 | 7.6% | 4.9% |
The fibres named most often across those 920 garments: polyester on 573 of them, spandex on 507, cotton on 296, viscose on 175, elastane on 97. 364 garments are 80% polyester or more. 279 are at least half cotton.
Synthetic is not a swear word here. Elastane is what lets a dress move with you, and polyester is what lets a jacket dry. What we object to is undisclosed polyester sold as though it were something else. The line we draw is the label, not the fibre.
Where the gaps sit, by supply lane
Our clothing reaches us through four lanes. We are not naming the companies on this page, but the shape of the problem is worth publishing, because it is not spread evenly.
| Lane | Products | Full composition | No fibre data | 80%+ synthetic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. European wholesale partner | 786 | 690 (87.8%) | 7 (0.9%) | 325 (41.3%) |
| B. Dropship platform, ships from Asia | 436 | 219 (50.2%) | 77 (17.7%) | 124 (28.4%) |
| C. Dropship platform, ships from Asia | 193 | 4 (2.1%) | 112 (58.0%) | 2 (1.0%) |
| D. Our own goods and small accounts | 26 | 7 (26.9%) | 9 (34.6%) | 0 |
Two readings follow from that table. The European wholesale lane documents almost everything it sells and also carries the most high-synthetic stock, which is a labelling success and a product question, not the same thing. Lane C documents almost nothing: 4 products out of 193. Its low synthetic figure is not good news, it is an absence of data.
Lane D is us. Seven of our own twenty-six products carry a full composition. We are not exempt from our own finding.
What an EU textile label has to state
Regulation (EU) No 1007/2011 on textile fibre names and labelling governs this. In short:
- Every textile product must state its fibre composition, using the fibre names the regulation permits.
- Fibres are listed with their percentage by weight, in descending order.
- "100%", "pure" or "all" may only be used for a product made of a single fibre.
- The information must reach the buyer before the purchase. For distance selling, that means it has to be in the online description, not only on a tag that arrives in the parcel.
Measured against that last point we fall short twice over. On 521 products we have no complete composition to publish. On most of the rest we have one and are not yet printing it where the shopper reads. We are not going to describe that as anything other than what it is.
What we do when a composition is missing
- Ask the maker. Every quote and every listing request now has to come back with fibre percentages and a photograph of the sewn-in care label. A supplier who cannot supply that has not finished the application.
- Order a sample. Where the answer is thin or the numbers look wrong, we buy the item ourselves and handle it. The founder hand-checking one dress is what caught the largest error in this very scan.
- Drop it. Where a maker will not or cannot state what a garment is made of, the product does not belong on the site. Undisclosed composition, high synthetic content and no sales is the profile we intend to clear out first.
Method
A script reads the live product record for every active clothing product, takes the description together with any supplier fabric, material or composition field, and parses it for fibre names and percentages. It then classifies each product into one of the four states in the first table and, where a full composition exists, into one of the four fibre groups in the second. It writes to a CSV and changes nothing on the site.
Known limits, stated so the numbers can be judged properly:
- It reads what we were told. It does not verify that the maker's claim is true. A stated "95% polyester" is a claim we are passing on, not a lab result.
- It reads the product record, not the rendered page. A product counted as documented here may still not display its composition to a shopper, for the reason given above.
- It covers active clothing products only. Home goods, beauty and accessories are out of scope.
- Text parsing makes mistakes. The first run of this scan classified a dress as natural-fibre because the word "down" inside "button-down" matched a fibre pattern. The founder had the garment in his hands and knew it was synthetic. We fixed the parser and re-ran it, which moved 74 products out of the "natural named" group and raised the "no fibre information" count from 131 to 205. The numbers on this page are from the corrected run.
- One scan is a photograph of one day. Supplier feeds change. We will re-run it and publish the new figures rather than quietly update these.
What we are fixing
These are the commitments on record. None of them carries a date, and we are not going to invent one to make this section read better.
- Composition becomes a gate, not a field. In the supplier portal a product with no fibre percentages cannot be listed at all.
- The composition gets printed where the shopper reads it. Holding the data in a back-office field and calling that transparency does not count.
- Nothing lists before it is measured. A supplier moves from application to evidence to a measured sample before any of their stock goes live.
- Every product gets a fabric grade. Documented natural, documented blend, engineered synthetic, or undisclosed, shown as such.
- Maker names are corrected across the catalogue. The real label where there is one, the words "No brand" where there is none, and our own name only on goods we actually make. Supplier platforms are never presented as brands.
- Existing pages get repaired or hibernated. Products that are undisclosed, high-synthetic and selling nothing are the first candidates to come down.
Where our clothes come from
We buy from partners in the EU, the United States and Asia. Origin is a fact we state, not a quality claim we hide behind. A garment made in Asia can be excellent and a garment made in Europe can be poor, and the country on the label tells you neither. What tells you something is the fibre content, the sample in hand and the measured delivery time. That is what we are building towards, and this report is a measure of how far there is to go.
For journalists, researchers and bloggers
You are welcome to quote, chart or republish any figure on this page, with attribution to WowStore.live and a link back here. If you want the underlying per-product data or the exact classification rules, write to info@wowstore.live and we will send it. If you find an error in our arithmetic or our reading of the regulation, tell us and we will correct the page and say that we did.
Related reading
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