Bluesign is stepping out from the supply chain shadows and into the world of consumers.

The Swiss certification system, better known to sourcing, product and sustainability teams than to shoppers, is launching its first global awareness campaign, The Unseen Process, on September 20 at the start of New York Climate Week. The campaign will center around Bluepass, a new certification label that can appear on product pages, hangtags and inside garments, with QR codes linking shoppers to verification pages.

For a long time, Bluesign has been assessing production sites, checking chemical inputs, and setting criteria for how materials and products are made; now, Bluepass will visibly bring that backend verification closer to the point of sale.

“The timing isn’t complicated,” says Bluesign CEO Hanane Taidi. The new EU rules under the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (ECGT), coming into force across member states from September 27, has put green claims on the agenda for fashion brands, she says, but “the real push came from our partners”.

Brands now need to make consumer-facing claims and take responsibility for whether those claims hold up, she adds, which is why they came to Bluesign needing to substantiate them with verified data.

Bluesign says the underlying criteria and assessment process have not changed, but the new naming, standardized label format, and QR-code are designed to make the substantiation behind a claim more accessible. Replacing Bluesign’s previous Approved and Product label, Bluepass looks at what goes into a product and how it is made, not only at the finished item; for apparel, at least 90% of textile components must come from production processes that have passed the Bluesign Criteria.

ECGT amends the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and further specifies the blacklist of commercial practices considered unfair in all circumstances. It also raises the bar for consumer-facing green claims in four key ways: generic environmental claims such as “green”, “eco-friendly” or “sustainable” need to be specific and substantiated; sustainability labels must be based on a qualifying certification scheme or public authority; brands cannot imply that an environmental benefit applies to a whole product if it only applies to one component or activity; and offset-based claims such as “carbon neutral” or “climate neutral” are prohibited when they rely on emissions offsets outside the product’s value chain.

For fashion brands, the updates add another layer to a familiar communications challenge. A claim may sound clear enough at surface level, but companies increasingly have to show what was verified, where in the supply chain that verification applies, and whether the consumer takeaway matches the evidence.

“Misleading consumers was already illegal,” says Daniele Seiffert, ESG legislation and policy expert at Retraced, a supply chain compliance platform for fashion and textiles. What ECGT adds, she says, is “new entries to the blacklist”, meaning some claims are now prohibited without a fresh debate over whether the average consumer was misled.

Changing role of certification

“Nothing changes about the work Bluesign does,” Taidi says, pointing to the same facility assessments, chemistry checks, and on-site controls that will be included in Bluepass verification, all of which the company has run for more than 25 years. What changes is where the name now appears: “On a hangtag, next to a QR code, in a consumer’s hand”.

(For chemistry checks, Bluesign assesses chemical inputs before they are used, worker protection from chemical exposure, and what manufacturing releases into the air and water.)

“We are trying to give [the brand’s] name a receipt,” Taidi says. Sustainability certification has traditionally operated as a backend compliance mechanism or a sourcing tool, but as environmental claims become more regulated, certification systems are being pulled further into the spotlight in the name of building brand trust.

This is a response to what brands now need when a claim is challenged. Historically, Taidi says, brands came to Bluesign for the assessment itself and to work on improving what they make.

Now, they need to focus on communicating the results to customers without their claim becoming a liability. Therefore, brands and manufacturers are looking for a verification partner that can “stand next to” them, which is why Bluepass is built around a system, rather than a single assessment.

The consumer-facing layer is only part of that system. Before Bluepass can appear on a product, says chief commercial officer Barbara Oswald, the chemical inputs going into the process have to be pre-approved, the manufacturer has to control what enters production, the site has to be assessed on the ground, and the relevant Bluesign criteria have to continue being met.

For brands, the appeal is not simply that Bluesign is more visible, but that they can showcase the work they’ve been doing behind the scenes. “Hangtag space is limited and valuable,” Oswald says.

“Visibility is a side effect of substantiation, not the goal.”

Meaghan Hembree, a partner at DLA Piper who advises consumer brands on greenwashing and sustainability-related risk, sees several pressures converging. Consumers are asking more about how products are made, what materials they contain, and which environmental attributes they carry, while brands are also navigating a wider regulatory surface area that includes extended producer responsibility (EPR), packaging recyclability, chemical restrictions, reporting obligations, and sustainability disclosure regimes.

Hembree sees brands moving away from broad claims such as “sustainable” or “eco-friendly” and toward narrower, evidence-backed communication. Product, sourcing and manufacturing claims, she says, tend to provide information that is less disputable and more readily verifiable. But those claims can still become vulnerable when infrastructure, regulatory definitions, or consumer understanding shift around them.

Certification is not, by itself, a shield. Verification marks and QR-backed disclosures can provide more information and help build trust, but only when brands carefully vet the certifying organization and clearly explain what the certification is intended to verify, Hembree says. The strongest programs, she adds, pair certification with accessible information about what has been substantiated.

At British outdoors brand Rab, this is playing out at the product level. Debbie Read, head of corporate communications and CSR, says that while third-party verification can support a claim, it “does not remove our responsibility to explain things clearly and honestly”, she flags.

Rab introduced its Material Facts program in 2023 to move away from broad, simplified claims and give customers more comparable product-level information. Similar to a nutrition label, Material Facts tables are found on the brand’s product pages, detailing information such as recycled materials by weight, PFAS content and country of manufacture, with renewable energy used in final product manufacturing also being introduced into the methodology — all of which, Read says, will help prepare Rab for digital product passports (DPPs).

Lightening the legislative burden

As green claims rules tighten, claims must be “specific, evidenced, proportionate and easy for consumers to understand”, says Read. This includes the language used across Rab’s product pages, hangtags and marketing materials, which connect directly back to evidence, supplier documentation, certificates and internal review processes. “If a claim cannot be substantiated clearly, we should not make it.”

That is where the operational burden becomes heavier. A scope certificate may prove that a supplier is certified, Retraced’s Seiffert says, but it does not prove that the certified material reached the product being advertised, or arrived in the quantity being claimed. That evidence has to exist per product and per order.

Philipp Mayer, CPO and co-founder of Retraced, says a single garment claim can rest on documents from a fiber producer, spinner, mill and garment factory. Every processing step may require a certified facility, while each material transfer requires its own transaction certificate.

Those documents arrive as PDFs and scans, often in different languages and formats. Retraced launched Certified Materials Management in May, positioning it as an AI tool to reconcile certified material claims across purchase orders, transaction certificates, and shipments.

The company says Patagonia and Columbia Sportswear are currently rolling it out.

While Mayer says the AI can read, connect and flag inconsistencies across supplier certificates, invoices and packing lists, Retraced keeps humans in the loop for sense-checking purposes. A flagged quantity gap could be a split shipment, or it could mean the certificate does not cover the goods.

Such certification marks and software platforms can help brands organize the evidence that legal, sourcing, compliance or marketing teams will eventually have to stand behind, even as the compliance responsibility remains with the brand.

Building company and consumer trust

In 2026, brands are increasingly carrying a heavy compliance load — from Ecodesign for Sustainable Product Regulation and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, to ECGT and state-level rules in the US — each with different thresholds and timelines. Faced with this mounting pressure, Oswald says, they are now asking Bluesign for guidance on how to comply correctly, as opposed to doing groundwork for them.

“[Brands want] someone they trust to tell them what applies to them, what it means in practice, and what they should actually do about it,” she says.

The trust problem extends far beyond mere regulatory compliance. “If a consumer does not understand what a claim means, they cannot meaningfully trust it,” Oswald says.

“They are trusting a symbol, which is not the same thing.” Bluepass, she argues, has to carry different levels of depth for different consumers: a simple signal for someone glancing at a hangtag, and more detail for someone who wants to know what is in a child’s clothing or how a product was made.

Meanwhile, Lisa Bergstrand, founder and director of Bergstrand Consultancy, says tighter environmental claims rules appear to be making some brands, including those doing serious sustainability work, less willing to communicate for fear of being accused of greenwashing. She warns that “greenhushing” could ultimately damage collective progress if sustainability drops out of the conversation and investment follows it down.

This is where certifications can fall short. Brands need to understand what a certification does and does not cover, she says, and not all certifications carry the same level of third-party checks or audits. Bergstrand also notes that certification systems often favor larger brands and producers that can afford the process, while smaller companies may be doing strong work without being able to certify it.

There is a consumer problem, too. Certifications can be a useful shortcut for shoppers, Bergstrand says, but few customers know exactly what each mark covers. As more certifications come to market, she warns, labels may add to fatigue rather than clarity. That is the tension facing Bluesign, Rab, and any other brand trying to make environmental information more transparent: the evidence has to be available, but it also has to be usable and understandable.

Rab frames the task as a balance between a clear headline message and deeper supporting evidence. Consumers should not be expected to become supply chain specialists, Read says, but they should be able to go deeper when they want to. Transparency, in this view, should mean presenting information in a way that is honest, comparable, and useful.

DLA Piper’s Hembree resists the idea that fashion is simply moving from sustainability storytelling to sustainability proof. The better framing, she says, is that environmental claims are shifting from a portfolio-wide marketing discussion to a more specific conversation about products, brands and local requirements across global supply chains. For fashion companies selling across markets, that means coordinating across legal, sourcing, compliance, marketing and communications rather than leaving sustainability language to any one function.

That coordination is where the promise and tension of the new green claims era sit. Narrower, evidence-backed claims may help clean up the vague sustainability language that has long frustrated consumers and regulators. They may also reward the brands with enough resources to pay for certification, digitize supplier documentation, and translate technical proof into consumer language.

The next phase of green claims, therefore, will favor brands that can show precisely what they mean. The harder test is whether they can make that evidence useful without turning sustainability into homework, and whether certification systems can build trust without becoming another badge in a crowded field.