When Oritain chief customer officer Gemma Lynch put a direct question to 122 cotton suppliers across six Asian manufacturing hubs — is traceability worth the trouble? — 85 percent answered yes, ranking it important or very important to their business.

That single response, drawn from the forensic verification firm's first Supplier Intelligence Report released Tuesday at Textile Exchange's annual meeting in Vancouver, lands a counter-narrative to the long-held view of upstream suppliers dragging their feet on compliance.

What did the survey actually find?

Oritain canvassed senior decision-makers at ginners, spinners, dyers, knitters and manufacturers across Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam. Three-quarters said they were open or very open to new traceability tools, and 74 percent already run some form of it.

Most of them, Lynch told Sourcing Journal, "are incredibly willing to collaborate and partner." That appetite signals compliance has moved past being a cost line item — at least on paper.

Why does this matter now?

The push for origin verification began with the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. New pressure keeps stacking: the European Union's Forced Labor Regulation, and Section 301 tariffs from Washington that target economies failing to enforce forced labor import bans.

For Tier 1 manufacturers and the cotton farms two or three tiers upstream, the compliance menu no longer reads as a single-buyer obligation. It's a stack of overlapping brand requests chasing the same bale of cotton.

What's actually in the way?

Cost, mostly. More than half of respondents flagged the price of certifications and compliance standards as a major hurdle, per the report. Another 48 percent cited inconsistent demand from retailers, and 55 percent said being recognized as a trusted partner felt out of reach. Nearly 40 percent named limited direct relationships as the trust barrier.

"There's a little bit of distrust between what the suppliers are providing and what the brands are accepting, and we were trying to tease a little bit of that out," Oritain vice president of retail sales Ben Tomkins said. The fix, he added, is "creating a two-sided ecosystem and network" — a single shared feed rather than "multiple requests from multiple brands" asking for the same origin data in different formats.

What does that look like in practice?

Oritain's answer is a tiered membership — Bronze, Silver and Gold — that scales forensic coverage by price. For smaller spinners with thin compliance budgets, even basic origin testing can beat paperwork alone. Lynch argues that pairing a scientific trace with a digital record gives both sides "a robust defense if their claims are investigated by a regulator."

That matters because the buyers downstream — fashion brands, retailers and US importers — increasingly need evidence that survives more than a paper audit. Documentary traceability breaks under forensic cross-examination; chemical and isotopic testing of fiber does not.

What's the sourcing takeaway?

Brands shopping for cotton now have a defensible reason to push past Tier 1. An audited Tier 2 spinner enrolled in a traceability program can offer what Tomkins called "a non-price attribute" — proof of origin that holds up under scrutiny beyond a transactional Level 1 audit.

"There's probably not one provider that can deliver every solution," Lynch said. "What's required is buyers and suppliers working together to ultimately deliver the kind of transparency that's needed."

For sourcing teams, the next move is concrete. The 55 percent of surveyed suppliers who don't yet feel recognized as trusted partners are watching to see which brand asks first. Put any shortlist mill a direct question: does it run traceability to a recognized standard, and which buyer demand is it currently answering to? That's the line separating a preferred mill from a fallback mill this season.