An accelerating wave of international regulations has global fashion brands scrambling to keep up, launching a new testing arms race in which brands are quickly building out their ability to verify compliance across every tier of production.
For example, in the EU, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive has expanded environmental and sustainability reporting mandates to over 50,000 companies. Germany enacted a Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, Norway has its own Transparency Act, and Canada now features its own modern slavery legislation.
Add in various U.S.-based regulations, like the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act and California’s Proposition 65, and the result is a dizzying web of complex regulations and overlapping requirements that global brands must meet in order to sell their products globally.
As such, compliance has rapidly evolved from a once-a-year audit process to a continuous effort that requires real-time collaboration across vendors, manufacturers and third-party labs.
Yet many apparel brands still rely on email threads, shared folders and spreadsheets to manage their lab testing. This drastically limits visibility, creates version control issues and slows decision making. Additionally, manual systems simply can’t support large-scale traceability.
Complex Products Lead to Compliance Headaches
Consider the example of a light-up children’s shoe. Say a footwear company designs a new licensed children’s sneaker with battery powered lights. In moving from design to the production stage, the brand knows it will encounter different regulations in both the U.S. and Europe, both for battery safety and children’s safety, in addition to standard footwear regulations.
To meet these requirements, the brand must provide verifiable lab test results for each regulation or risk receiving rising penalties from governing bodies. Multiply this scenario by the thousands of SKUs the footwear brand produces, and brands are facing both a regulatory and logistical nightmare.
Meeting today’s regulatory pressure increasingly means scaling lab testing, though the rising costs and slower timelines create risks of their own. When testing documentation is siloed or incomplete, the chances of non-compliance, shipment delays, and recalls rise sharply. Additionally, the manual testing of thousands of SKUs does not allow brands to keep pace with today’s rapid product development timelines. As go-to-market windows shrink, delays in testing can derail entire product launches and seasonal roll outs.
Testing Represents the Latest Frontier
Across the apparel and footwear landscape, brands face mounting audits, regulatory mandates and intensifying stakeholder scrutiny. In response, brands are rapidly scaling their testing and compliance programs in an escalating arms race, with some multiplying audits many times over.
This represents a fundamental shift in how brands view traceability. It’s no longer simply corporate aspiration; it’s a necessary license to operate. Traceability is the operational foundation for meeting legal, ethical and competitive expectations in today’s global marketplace.
But this testing burden is just the latest development on top of the nightmare scenarios that brands already face with evolving tariff policies, rapidly changing supplier bases and supplier price negotiations. The result? Perhaps the most difficult business climate for global apparel brands and retailers since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Industry Evolution Drives Innovation
Amid this challenging, burdensome landscape, data-driven systems that turn product integrity and compliance from a reactive cost center into a centralized source of insight and resilience will define the future of lab testing.
Four forces are having a tangible impact on testing, each pointing to a future that will likely require a stronger digital backbone that automates and centralizes lab test management.
- Globalization of sourcing and testing: Apparel brands source and manufacture across more countries and regions than ever before, creating inconsistencies in test standards, timelines and documentation. For global apparel brands, centralizing test data across regions and labs has become a strategic necessity not only for compliance, but also for operational coherence.
- Convergence of compliance, quality and sustainability: Lab testing is no longer about simply checking regulatory boxes, it’s intertwined with chemical management, supplier accountability and product integrity. Brands are embedding lab testing into broader environmental and sustainability initiatives, requiring digital tools that can handle multi-dimensional compliance, not just test results.
- Acceleration of product timelines: From the prior example, if the licensed children’s shoe is to meet today’s speed-to-market product launch demands, automated lab testing processes are a must. Brands are moving away from reactive, manual systems to automated, integrated workflows that reduce testing cycle times and avoid costly delays.
- Demand for traceability and real-time visibility: As both regulatory and consumer demand for transparency grows, brands need complete audit trails, proactive risk identification and real-time access to testing performance. Fragmented systems just can’t keep up, but automation helps to ensure that apparel brands can track, benchmark and act of real-time lab data across regions.
Automated Testing Creates Value
Today’s escalating requirements for lab testing will result in a future that is defined by proactive, connected and data-informed systems. Apparel brands that continue to rely on legacy processes may be able to meet minimum standards, but they will likely struggle to effectively scale, adapt and compete in the global market.
Some brands are already embedding digital lab testing into sourcing, compliance, and product development, using results to strengthen products, improve supplier performance, and build consumer trust.
Within an industry defined by complexity and constant change, lab testing has emerged as a key differentiator, not just a compliance requirement.
Testing remains a requirement for compliance, but it is steadily becoming part of the broader foundation that helps brands manage complexity and adapt to a more demanding landscape.
