Why the Fashion Industry Needs Standardisation
The case for a common, scientific standard across sourcing, costing, and compliance
Fashion has already been through a turbulent stretch this year. Brands and retailers are still working through extended supply chain disruption, and shipping companies continue to reroute around the Suez Canal to avoid conflict in the region — a reminder that the industry didn't enter this year from a position of logistical stability.
That instability is being made worse by a persistent, deeper problem: many brands, and by extension their customers, still don't have a clear picture of their own supply chains — where products are made, what materials go into them, and critically, who is doing the work and how they're being paid. A recent sourcing and supply chain survey found that 67% of brand and retail businesses rate their visibility into key supply chain metrics as either "fair" or "lacking." That gap has a real impact on the industry's ability to measure and manage efficiency and its wider environmental and social footprint.
At the same time, demand for transparency and disclosure is only growing. 2024 marked a turning point, with fashion businesses increasingly expected to build and maintain solid records of where their products come from, what they're made of, and how their supply chains operate. Across every part of that data picture, one thing has become clear: brands and their partners can no longer rely on approximation, averaging, or intuition. Data has to rule.
Regulation is raising the bar
The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) came into force around the middle of last year, expanding the range of companies — from large enterprises down to SMEs — required to report on environmental and social performance. Many of those businesses are already reporting against 2024 financial-year data, with disclosures due for publication in 2025. Close behind it is the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), a differently scoped piece of legislation that focuses on accountability for the social and environmental impact of business operations, and which will further tighten expectations around due diligence and reporting.
It isn't only brands and retailers feeling the pressure. Suppliers and manufacturers across the multi-tier supply chain are facing a growing lack of standardisation in the information they're asked to provide, increasing scrutiny of their operations from brands, inspectors, legislators and consumers alike, and a competitive landscape where brand customers are shopping around more than ever to protect themselves from disruption and chase better margins.
Against that backdrop, both suppliers and manufacturers need dependable ways to secure business continuity, mitigate risk, and hold their own on cost, speed, and other key metrics — all while keeping pace with tightening regulation. In short: it's no longer just brands that need higher levels of agility, visibility, and efficiency — it's the whole industry.
Standardisation as the foundation for collaboration
This is what makes the push for standardisation, proven data, and a shared foundation for negotiation and collaboration one of the industry's most pressing challenges — particularly when it comes to how garment workers are paid.
For brands, staying agile typically means rethinking sourcing strategy: diversifying and deepening supplier relationships, finding new partners, and redefining how they work with existing ones, all while remaining competitive, compliant, and conscious of environmental and ethical impact. Suppliers, meanwhile, are under pressure to build their own efficiencies, protect margins, and trade with customers on the basis of accurate, standardised data rather than guesswork.
With the right data foundations in place, businesses on both sides can model and test decisions, compare production environments, machinery, logistics and other variables, and diversify their sourcing bases — or their customer base, in the case of suppliers — with real confidence.
The Standard Minute Value: a proven building block
What fashion needs, in essence, is the equivalent of the tools that let consumer markets compare products and prices at a glance: a way to directly compare one proposition against another using consistent, trusted indicators.
That tool already exists, and has for a long time: the Standard Minute Value (SMV). According to the ILO's Introduction to Work Study, an SMV is the time a qualified worker should take to complete a task at a defined rate of output, under normal working conditions, given they understand and are motivated to follow the specified method. In other words, it's a rigorous, scientific standard for the work that goes into bringing a product to market.
Despite sounding purely technical, a properly calculated SMV is far from a cold, abstract number. It builds in allowances for rest, machine delays, and other contingencies — meaning it reflects the realities of human labour, not just theoretical output.
Why home-grown spreadsheets fall short
As the industry looks to build a stronger data foundation, it makes sense to look at a tool that already exists and has already proven itself at scale — one that industry leaders like Coats Digital have built successful solutions on top of. A consistent framework of independent, objective, human-centred SMVs can underpin core business processes: production targets, line balancing, production planning, incentive schemes, and assessing operator and factory performance. It also gives brands and suppliers a shared foundation for accurate costing, sustainable sourcing, and genuine collaboration.
It's important, though, to distinguish this from an in-house spreadsheet of SMVs (sometimes labelled SAMs) built up gradually through averaging, homegrown calculations, and broad regional labour costing. A spreadsheet built by a single brand and updated only occasionally — even if it started with good intentions and was accurate at some point — is not the same as a true labour quantification and costing solution. Of the two approaches, only one is built to withstand disruption, regulatory change, and growing consumer scrutiny.
GSDCost: turning the standard into a practical tool
Built on General Sewing Data (GSD), now the global standard in time-cost and method analysis, GSDCost from Coats Digital has introduced new functionality to help brands collaborate more meaningfully with vendor partners and support more sustainable, responsible growth across the fashion supply chain.
GSDCost lets brands use internationally recognised, scientifically backed standard time benchmarks to build credible Bill of Labour (BOL) garment style requests, send them to multiple vendors simultaneously, and quickly compare the resulting Cost-to-Make responses. A shared, accurate, common language supports better cost prediction, fact-based negotiation, and a more efficient garment sourcing process — while also helping brands meet CSR commitments and set clear, comparable sustainability benchmarks.
Coats Digital developed this functionality directly in response to feedback from brand customers about the challenges of meaningful supplier collaboration and securing accurate Cost-to-Make quotes based on standardised criteria. The new brand-facing features allow companies to create, compare, and assess BOL estimates using the same language and methodology across every vendor in their value chain — making it easier to understand cost differences between suppliers, whether that's down to more advanced machinery, greater automation, or stronger, fairer wage practices. It also helps brands quickly identify which vendors are falling short of new global compliance rules, and which ones they want to build closer relationships with.
The platform's Fair Wage Tool, backed by the Fair Wage Network and the International Labour Organisation, adds a further layer: calculating fair wage allowances, supporting on-time delivery through accurate SMV-based planning, and feeding into a digital feedback loop via native integration with shop-floor solutions — comparing actual performance against the standard in real time.
A foundation that already exists
Much of what the fashion industry is trying to achieve — around compliance, cost, sourcing, and measuring impact within both human and environmental limits — is often framed as a search for something new. In reality, that foundation already exists, and has been tested and proven for years from the standpoint of fair labour, accurate costing, and brand-supplier collaboration.
What's changed is the usability, collaboration, and integration layer built on top of it. Tools like GSDCost are helping fashion businesses put that proven standard to work, giving the industry a genuine opportunity to move toward greater resilience, stability, and long-term success — built on a shared, scientific, and fair foundation rather than approximation and guesswork.