We Tried to Trace Every Thread in Your Sweatshirt — Here's What We Found

Every clothing brand says the same three words: sustainable, ethical, transparent. Almost none of them can show you what those words actually mean. We wanted to — so we spent months tracing our own supply chain, thread by thread, to see how much of our story we could genuinely prove. This is what we found. Including the uncomfortable parts.

What we could prove

Start with the good news, because there's a lot of it. Every TURTLEGROOVE garment is made in Canada — and we mean made, not "designed here and sewn overseas." We can name the actual buildings:

• The fabric is knit at Fine Cotton Factory in Etobicoke, Ontario.
• It's dyed and washed at Canadian Textiles Services in Brampton.
• It's cut and sewn at Jerico in Toronto.
• Then it comes to us in Burlington, where every piece is embroidered and finished.

Both fabric facilities are audited under a single GOTS scope certificate — number CU848243GOTS-2026-00010952, issued by Control Union. And you don't have to take our word for it: you can search that number yourself in the public GOTS database at global-standard.org. That's the whole point of a real certificate — it's checkable by a stranger.

The part we can't prove (yet)

Now the uncomfortable bit. Cotton doesn't grow in Canada — it can't; our climate won't allow it. Ours is grown and spun in India, under an organic standard that GOTS recognises. But here's the honest limit: we cannot trace it to the individual farms, the gin, or the spinner. We know it's certified organic. We do not know the name of the field it grew in. Most brands would round that up to "ethically sourced organic cotton" and move on. We'd rather tell you exactly where our knowledge ends — and keep working to close the gap.

The supplier we had to let go

There's a harder story, too. A while back, one of our suppliers told us a portion of our fabric was GOTS-certified. When we asked to see the certificate, what came back was a six-year-old document for a batch of yarn — one that didn't name our supplier and, in its own fine print, said it didn't entitle anyone to claim GOTS at all. It didn't hold up.

So we made a choice. Rather than stay quiet and keep selling, we stopped using that supplier and moved every one of those garments onto the single Canadian chain we could fully verify. It cost us something to do that. It was also the only version of "transparent" we could actually live with.

What we still don't do

We're not going to end on a victory lap, because there's one more thing we won't dress up. Our garments are made under enforced Canadian employment law, which sets and polices a wage floor — genuinely more than most fashion supply chains on earth can say. But a legal minimum is not a living wage, and we won't pretend it is. It's something we're honest about, and something the whole industry still has to solve.

Why we publish the gaps

Here's what we've learned. Trust doesn't come from a brand that claims to be perfect. It comes from one that shows its work — the verified parts and the unfinished parts, side by side. Anyone can publish the flattering half. We decided to publish all of it — including the cotton we can't trace and the wage question we can't yet answer — because you deserve to make your decision with the real picture, not the marketing one.

You can see the full, receipts-and-all version — certificate numbers, factory addresses, the lot — on our Sustainability page, or read how a garment goes from organic cotton yarn to finished piece in Canada. And if an honestly-made, genuinely Canadian sweatshirt is what you're after — that's exactly what we make. Shop the collection →