More than organic cotton: The fabrics behind our sports shirts
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When sustainable fashion is discussed, one word comes up almost reflexively: organic cotton. Understandable – it’s tangible, GOTS-certified, and an organic label is easy to communicate. But anyone who has ever exercised in pure cotton knows the problem: it soaks up sweat, sticks to the body, and dries agonizingly slowly. That’s no drama for a streetwear shirt. For a sports shirt, however, it is.
Why pure cotton reaches its limits during sports
Cotton fibers are absorbent, but that is exactly what makes them impractical for sports: they soak up moisture instead of wicking it away from the body. That is why many sports collections – including ours – consciously work with blended fabrics or functional fibers like recycled polyester. Recycled polyester is made from PET bottles or textile production waste, saves crude oil and CO₂ compared to virgin material, and provides exactly the properties a shirt needs for running, yoga, or cycling: quick-drying, breathable, shape-retaining.
This means: not every GeorgWerner shirt is one hundred percent organic cotton – and we prefer to be honest about that rather than hide it. For us, material selection is not a marketing claim, but a question of function that depends on what a shirt is made for. A calm Water-Nomads piece, which is worn more in everyday life than during intense training, can work with a higher cotton content. A shirt intended for movement gets the fiber content that actually makes sense for that purpose.
Honest material selection instead of an organic label as a fig leaf
We are not about plastering every shirt with a sustainability buzzword. We are about ensuring that a motif, which we develop with AI assistance and then have printed, lands on a fabric that fits the purpose. That is why we take a fresh look at every collection: where is organic cotton worthwhile, where are recycled functional fibers needed, and where is a mix of both? We make this decision consciously, not because a supplier happens to be offering a discount on a material.
And because we produce using a print-on-demand process, no shirt is created on speculation. Every item is only printed once it has been ordered – regardless of which fabric it consists of. That doesn't change the material question, but it does mean: no raw material, no matter how sustainable it is, is produced for a shelf that may never be emptied.
In short: sustainability for us is not a single label, but a series of small, honest decisions – from the motif to the thread.
