11 Brands Like Kowtow for Certified Organic Basics
You pick the organic cotton tee, you go to pay, and the number isn't the one you saw. Kowtow runs three storefronts, and its Classic Tee is NZ$99 on the New Zealand site, US$69 on the American one and A$99 on the Australian one. Same tee, three shops. So every figure below is quoted in the currency the store served us, with nothing converted, and we've said which currency each time.
Kowtow itself is in good shape. The New Zealand store held 341 products and 1,460 of 2,034 variants in stock when we checked on 15 August 2026, prices in NZD, with the Classic Tee at NZ$99 and Riley Jeans at NZ$299. What sends people looking elsewhere is range, shipping, and the price of a single-fibre organic cotton dress.
Here are 11 brands worth putting next to it. For each one we looked up who holds the eco certificate the brand advertises, because that turned out to be the thing that separates them. Kowtow is a useful benchmark on that score: its own Anatomy of a Garment page attaches Fairtrade and GOTS to the cotton and the thread, and Oeko-Tex Standard 100 to the garment labels and the shell buttons. The one certificate Kowtow holds in its own name is B Corp, issued by B Lab in May 2022.
Who holds a sustainability certificate? A textile certificate is issued to a specific legal entity, and that entity is often a farm, a mill, a tannery or a sewing factory rather than the brand on the label. GOTS is the clearest example: only a company holding its own Scope Certificate may put the GOTS mark on a finished product. So "GOTS cotton" and "GOTS-certified brand" are two different claims, and only one of them covers the company taking your money.
Quick comparison:
- Closest to Kowtow: Kotn and Organic Basics, both plain natural-fibre staples with the sourcing documented.
- Cheapest way in: Thought, at £7.95 a pair of socks, and Organic Basics at €15 a brief.
- Most premium: Cuyana at US$298 for a tote and Reformation at US$178 for a sweater.
- Strongest certification: Nudie Jeans, the only brand here holding GOTS in its own name.
- Filling a gap Kowtow leaves: Girlfriend Collective for the gym, Veja for shoes, Matt & Nat for bags, Christy Dawn for anything you'd wear to a wedding, Eileen Fisher for buying the look secondhand.
| Brand | What it sells | Price we checked | Who holds the eco certificate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reformation | Dresses, denim, knitwear | US$178 cashmere sweater | Ref Fiber Standards, a grading system Reformation wrote itself |
| Thought | Socks, leggings, loungewear | £7.95 bamboo socks | TENCEL and LENZING ECOVERO, fibre marks owned by Lenzing |
| Girlfriend Collective | Activewear, underwear | US$108 leggings | Oeko-Tex Standard 100, attached to the fabric |
| Nudie Jeans | Denim | US$195 jeans | GOTS Scope Certificate held by Nudie Jeans itself |
| Eileen Fisher | Womenswear, resale | US$55 to US$75 on Renew | Unreadable, the main site blocked every check |
| Veja | Sneakers | US$180 V-10 Leather | Fair for Life, held by the rubber-tapper cooperatives |
| Matt & Nat | Bags, shoes, outerwear | CA$145 tote | No third-party certificate named on its own site |
| Organic Basics | Underwear, tees, base layers | €15 briefs | GOTS and GRS per product, certified by Control Union CU 1067589 |
| Christy Dawn | Dresses, knitwear | US$198 dress | Fairtrade, held by its Peruvian knitting workshops |
| Kotn | Tees, shirts, trousers | CA$198 trousers | B Corp, held by Kotn as a company |
| Cuyana | Bags, small leather goods | US$298 tote | Leather Working Group, held by the tanneries |
Reformation
Reformation sells dresses, denim and knitwear out of Los Angeles, and the sustainability case it makes rests on a system it wrote itself. Ref Fiber Standards grades materials A to E on Reformation's own site, with TENCEL lyocell, recycled cotton and cashmere, regeneratively grown cotton and deadstock in the top band. TENCEL is Lenzing's trademark, so that particular mark travels with the fibre and not with Reformation, and the A-to-E grading has no outside auditor behind it at all.
The Cashmere Boyfriend Sweater, 95% recycled cashmere and 5% virgin, showed US$178 when we looked. The site was running 30% off across the whole store that day, so check the banner before you decide what anything costs here. If you want the longer argument about the brand's claims, we go through it in is Reformation fast fashion.
Against Kowtow, the split is fibre policy. Kowtow builds nearly everything from one material so a finished piece can be recycled whole. Reformation runs silk, linen and viscose alongside cotton, which is why it can make an occasion dress and Kowtow can't.
Best for: Party and wedding-guest dresses when your weekday wardrobe is already plain cotton.
Thought
Thought is a British sustainable-basics brand that now, in practice, sells socks, and you should know that before you click. The old address, wearethought.com, redirects to thoughtsocks.com, and of the 924 listings we counted there, 521 are socks against 16 trousers and 6 tops. The company came through administration and rebuilt around the category that kept selling.
What survives alongside the socks is the layer under everything else: leggings, joggers, nightwear, underwear and tights. Prices are in pounds. Birdie Colour Block Bamboo Socks are £7.95 and blend 53% viscose derived from bamboo, 28% recycled polyester, 16% organic cotton and 3% elastane. The Essential Bamboo Organic Cotton Leggings are £27.95.
On certification, Thought's materials page names TENCEL, LENZING ECOVERO and SeaCell. Those are fibre trademarks owned by the companies that spin them, and we found no certificate issued in Thought's own name anywhere on the site. If you came here for Kowtow-style dresses, they've gone. For the £8 sock drawer underneath, this is the closest match on the list.
Best for: Restocking socks and base layers in bamboo and organic cotton blends.
Girlfriend Collective
Girlfriend Collective makes activewear out of recycled plastic, and it's unusual on this list for publishing its own chemical test results. The Compressive High-Rise Legging is US$108, blends 79% recycled water bottles with 21% spandex, and the product page puts 25 bottles in each pair. Sizing runs XXS to 6XL, and that listing alone carries 18,556 reviews at 4.7 stars.
The certificate the brand names is Oeko-Tex Standard 100, and its About page attaches it to the material rather than the business: "All our recycled fabric is certified Standard 100 by OEKO-TEX." We searched the site for the SA8000 factory certification that gets repeated about this brand and found nothing, so that claim isn't coming from Girlfriend Collective. It publishes its own PFAS and total fluorine results instead, all of which came back not detected. That's a different kind of evidence and a checkable one.
Kowtow doesn't make performance clothing. This fills that hole without dropping the standard, and we compare it against its own peers in brands like Girlfriend Collective.
Best for: Size-inclusive leggings and sports bras with published fabric testing.
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Nudie Jeans
Nudie Jeans is the only brand on this list holding a GOTS certificate in its own name. Its post "Nudie Jeans goes GOTS" says the company became fully GOTS-certified as a brand in January 2024, that an independent audit of the organisation produced a Scope Certificate, and that the Scope Certificate is what lets it put the GOTS label on a product at all. It names the certified partners too: denim manufacturing in Italy and Tunisia, fabric mills in Turkey, Italy and Japan, tops production in India, Turkey and Portugal.
That's the distinction worth carrying around. A brand-held Scope Certificate covers the organisation and its chain of custody. A fibre trademark covers a thread. They get written the same way in marketing copy and they mean different things.
Prices are in US dollars on the en-US store. Lean Dean Dry 16 Dips and Gritty Jackson Black Forest both list at US$195. The cotton in every pair of Nudie denim has been 100% certified organic since 2012, and every pair comes with free repairs at a Nudie Jeans Repair Shop, a service the founders Maria Erixon Levin and Joakim Levin started in 2007.
Best for: One pair of jeans you keep repairing instead of replacing.
Eileen Fisher
Eileen Fisher blocked every read we attempted, so we can't quote a price or a certificate from the main store and we won't guess at one. The domain returns Akamai's Access Denied page to a desktop browser user agent, to a search-engine user agent and to a text proxy, and robots.txt sits behind the same wall, which closes the last door usually left open.
What we could read is the brand's own resale site, Eileen Fisher Renew, at eileenfisherrenew.com. It's a live store priced in US dollars with 2,750 listings, almost all of them one-of-one secondhand pieces, and the ones we opened sat between US$55 and US$75: a Tencel organic cotton silk pullover at US$55, a silk georgette crepe shirt at US$75. Availability is the catch at 836 of 3,302 variants, which is what a single-piece resale catalogue looks like.
The overlap with Kowtow is real. Both run take-back schemes, Kowtow through Relove and Repair, Eileen Fisher through Renew, and both sell long, plain, natural-fibre pieces. We line the brand up against its closest competitors in brands like Eileen Fisher.
Best for: Buying the label secondhand first and seeing whether the cut suits you.
Veja
Veja is a French sneaker brand and the obvious pairing for a Kowtow wardrobe, since Kowtow lists only a handful of shoes. The certificate Veja advertises belongs to its suppliers rather than to Veja. Its project site says the Amazonian rubber in its soles was certified Fair for Life in 2019, that Fair for Life is run by Ecocert, and that under it the rubber-tapper associations and cooperatives receive a bonus of R$0.60 per kilo to invest in development projects. The certificate names them, not the shoe company.
The numbers behind it hold up better than most fair-trade copy. Veja soles are 50% Amazonian rubber. In July 2025 the market price for semi-processed rubber was R$4.79 a kilo and Veja paid R$25.45, and it has bought more than 4,382 tonnes since 2004.
Watch the storefront. veja-store.com sends you to the French shop by default. On the US path the V-10 Leather is US$180, the V-10 in Alveomesh is US$160 and the Campo Leather is US$175. We run a wider comparison of the alternatives in shoe brands like Veja.
Best for: A white sneaker with a traceable, independently certified sole.
Matt & Nat
Matt & Nat names no third-party textile certificate anywhere on its own site. We read Our Story, Our Materials and Transparency and found composition figures instead of certificates, which is worth stating plainly rather than implying a mark that isn't claimed.
Those figures are specific. Grain, the bestselling material, is 58% recycled post-consumer polyester with recycled pre-consumer polyurethane. Theme, Forum and the Solstice Series are 100% polyurethane. Studio 901 uses UPPEAL, an apple-waste material made in Italy. The brand started in Montreal in 1995 as MAT(T)ERIAL and NATURE, has used no animal leather since day one, and says its linings have been 100% recycled plastic bottles since 2007, working out at around 9 million bottles a year.
The store served us Canadian dollars. The Charlot SM Vegan Tote in Grain is CA$145, though it was on pre-order in that colour when we checked, with 4,128 of 7,956 variants in stock across 895 listings. Kowtow sells clothes and nothing to carry them in, so this is the gap it fills.
Best for: A structured everyday bag with the material composition printed on the page.
Organic Basics
Organic Basics is the clearest brand here about what its certificates do and don't cover. Its materials page says "Only products carrying the GOTS label and claim are certified (certified by CU 1067589)" and repeats the same sentence for the Global Recycled Standard. CU 1067589 is a Control Union certifier code, so the certificate is issued per product by an outside body. That single line does more work than a page of general claims, because it tells you the GOTS mark applies to the item in your basket and not to the company behind it.
The company holds its own certificate separately as a Certified B Corporation, and it supports 1% for the Planet.
The Copenhagen store priced in euros for us. Core Briefs in 95% organic cotton are €15 and the Core Boxer Briefs 3-Pack is €56. The catalogue is deep at 1,770 listings with 11,625 of 14,056 variants available, and heavily weighted to underwear, bras and tees. That's the layer Kowtow doesn't cover, and we put the brand against its rivals in brands like Organic Basics.
Best for: Replacing a whole underwear drawer with GOTS-labelled pieces.
Christy Dawn
Christy Dawn puts its Fairtrade certificate on the workshops, and says so in as many words. Its Farm-to-Closet page states that all sweaters made with its Peruvian partners come from Fairtrade-certified workshops, that dressmakers at its Los Angeles factory earn at least 25% above the LA minimum wage measured against MIT's Living Wage Calculator, and that its shoes come from a Guatemalan workshop paying a living wage. Three claims, three named locations, one certificate that belongs to somebody else.
The clothes run romantic where Kowtow runs plain. Prices are in US dollars. The Dawn Dress is US$198 in 100% regenerative cotton grown on the brand's own farm in Erode, India, with a petite cut at the same price, and the catalogue holds 450 listings, 141 of them dresses, with 1,355 of 2,376 variants available.
The rest of the range runs on deadstock, meaning leftover fabric another label ordered and didn't use. That's why a print here often sells out and doesn't come back, so buy the one you like when you see it. If you want Kowtow's ethics without its severity, this is the swap.
Best for: A floaty dress you'll wear to every summer wedding for a decade.
Kotn
Kotn holds a company certificate rather than a fabric one, which is the mirror image of Kowtow. Its About page says Kotn is a certified B Corporation voted Best for the World, with the fourth-highest B Impact Score of any apparel brand in North America. B Lab certifies the business, its governance and its workers, and says nothing at all about the cotton in a given shirt.
The brand started when one of its three co-founders, Rami, spent six months living in a cotton-farming community in the Nile Delta. Ben and Mackenzie make up the rest of the founding trio. The Beit Kotn programme is where the community investment sits.
Kotn's storefront re-prices by region and served us Canadian dollars, so look at the currency toggle before you read a number. The Women's Plaza Trouser in 100% lyocell twill, made in Portugal, lists at CA$198 and was down to CA$79 on final sale when we checked. If you like Kowtow's tee-and-trouser core, this is the nearest equivalent, and we cover its peers in brands like Kotn.
Best for: Plain shirts and trousers in Egyptian cotton with the farm relationship documented.
Cuyana
Cuyana spreads its certificates across its tanneries and its mills, and none of them sits with Cuyana. Its materials page says 100% of its tanneries are certified by the Leather Working Group, its cotton poplin is a GOTS-certified organic blend, its linen and its regenerated stretch nylon are Oeko-Tex certified, and its suppliers page says its Vietnamese partner uses GRS-certified recycled polyester. Read as a supply-chain map, that's useful. Read as a claim about the brand, it says less than it looks like saying.
Prices are in US dollars. The Classic Easy Tote is US$298 and the insert that slots inside costs US$118. Bags and small leather goods make up 456 of the 912 listings, so this is a leather-goods business with clothing attached rather than the other way round.
One thing to know before you shop: 1,326 of 5,710 variants were available when we checked, so a colour you had in mind may not be there. We compare the bags directly in brands like Cuyana for minimalist bags.
Best for: A leather tote from tanneries with a named third-party audit behind them.
Which One to Start With
Work backwards from the certificate you care about. Nudie Jeans is the only brand here holding a mark that covers the whole company and its chain of custody. Organic Basics prints the certifier code next to the product, which is the per-item version of the same idea. For workers named by location, Christy Dawn and Veja both point at specific workshops and cooperatives.
Then work backwards from the gap in your wardrobe, because Kowtow already covers dresses, tees and trousers. Girlfriend Collective covers the gym, Organic Basics and Thought cover the layer underneath, Veja covers shoes, and Matt & Nat and Cuyana cover bags.
And read the currency before the number. Four of these eleven priced in something other than US dollars for us, and one of them changed its mind between requests. More options are in our roundup of the best sustainable clothing brands, or tell us what you're after and we'll point you at something specific.
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Written by
Spencer Lanoue
