Bedding often serves as the statement piece around which an entire bedroom is designed—but because of the inherent environmental and social complexities of the cotton industry, there’s a lot more to consider about a comforter than just its thread count.
There are a variety of ways to tell if bedding was made in an environmentally friendly way, including Fair Trade certification, which guarantees the products have come from farms that provide fair wages and safe working conditions (including prohibiting forced child labor); the Global Organic Textile Standard, or GOTS, which ensures the organic status of materials from harvesting to labeling and requires environmentally and socially responsible manufacturing; and Oeko-Tex, a standard that tests for harmful substances used in dyes and finishes. These labels can speak to not only the quality of the material, but also how those materials were farmed, who they were farmed by and in what conditions they were manufactured. Sheets, for example, are often treated with the known carcinogen formaldehyde to help prevent wrinkles, but if a product features an Oeko-Tex label, it’s been deemed free of such harmful chemicals.
It’s becoming easier to find bedding that meets these standards as the wellness craze has trickled down from food and beauty and into the linen closet. For the modern consumer, it’s not enough for a product to look and feel high-quality—they want to know how it’s made as well. It was that curiosity that led Missy Tannen and her husband, Scott Tannen, to found Boll & Branch, an organic bedding company, seven years ago. We spoke with Tannen about her journey into ethical textile manufacturing, how the brand has expanded and why organic materials matter now more than ever.
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