Doing the Hard Work Behind the Label: Grey Matter Concepts’ Approach to Sustainability and Traceability
By Robert P. Antoshak, Vice President, Global Strategic Sourcing & Development, Grey Matter Concepts
The apparel business doesn’t suffer from a shortage of sustainability promises. Every trade show booth has a “green” banner. Every deck has a slide with trees and arrows. You’d think, judging by the marketing, that we’ve already solved the problem. Meanwhile, mills struggle, factories close, and workers still live with the consequences of an industry that chases price first and cleans up the story later.
Grey Matter Concepts is a small brand in that noisy landscape: men’s basics -- underwear, socks, tees, loungewear. No runway, no limited drops, no performance theater. That narrow focus is intentional. If you want to take sustainability and traceability seriously, you don’t start with a 400-style line plan spread across 10 countries. You start with a tight assortment and design the supply chain with the same discipline you want from your environmental claims.
We don’t treat sustainability or traceability as slogans or side projects. They’re the guardrails on the business. They cut off certain fibers, suppliers, and deals, and they decide where our money and time go. Sometimes that slows us down, sometimes it forces us to move faster. It’s not glossy or glamorous work, but it’s the job.
Sustainability done properly looks less like a glossy video and more like a stack of shipping documents, lab tests, wage records, and power bills that line up.
This article isn’t a victory lap. We’re building; we’re not finished. The point is to explain how we think about sustainability and traceability at Grey Matter, where we are making progress, where we still have work to do, and why we’ve chosen a path that prioritizes verifiable facts over feel-good marketing.
Start With Fiber, Not With a Hangtag
Most sustainability conversations in fashion start at the store: hangtags, point-of-sale messaging, capsule collections. We start much earlier, at fiber. If you care about impact, you can’t treat fiber choice as an afterthought. What you spin drives water use, chemical profiles, energy demand, and end-of-life options before a single stitch is sewn.
Our bias at Grey Matter is toward cotton for our core basics. Cotton isn’t perfect (no fiber is), but it's familiar, breathable, and, when grown and handled responsibly, it can carry a lighter footprint than many synthetic-heavy alternatives. We are working to increase the share of preferred cotton in our supply, including through programs that better document soil health, water management, and farmer livelihoods. At the same time, we're honest: we still rely on elastane and other synthetics in our products where performance and fit demand it. The point is to minimize, not deny, those choices.
That fiber-first view forces us to map our supply chain upstream instead of treating the spinning mill as the beginning of the story. We want to know where our cotton is ginned, how it moves, and under what conditions it is processed. That means partnering with spinners and fabric mills willing to segregate lots, maintain documentation, and accept that we will ask for more data, not less. It's slower. It's harder. But it's the only way to make traceability more than a buzzword.
By putting fiber at the center of our thinking, we also set a more realistic bar for what "better" looks like. We don't pretend that a single farm program or a single certification flips a switch. We treat it as one variable in a larger system: yield stability for farmers, risk management for mills, and quality consistency for our brand. Sustainability only works if it's compatible with economic reality all the way down the chain.
Traceability as an Operating System, Not a Tagline
Traceability, in our view, is the ability to answer a simple question without resorting to storytelling: “Who touched this garment, and how do you know?” You need receipts, not anecdotes. Bills of lading, purchase orders, lot numbers, test reports, and audit findings. If those don't line up, your traceability story is just that — a story.
At Grey Matter, we’re building traceability into our business's operating system. We keep the assortment narrow on purpose because every new fabric, factory, or fiber blend multiplies the complexity of tracking. Fewer core programs, higher volumes, and deeper relationships with select partners enable following the product as it moves from fiber to yarn to fabric to cut-and-sew, rather than losing the thread in a maze of intermediaries.
Digitization is necessary, but it’s not magic. We are investing in systems that capture key data at each step, but the human side matters as much. Our partners must be willing to keep lots separate, record handoffs accurately, and open their books when we ask. That requires trust, shared incentives, and contracts that reward transparency rather than just the lowest FOB.
Verification closes the loop. Document trails are essential, but we don’t want to rely solely on paperwork. Technologies such as isotope analysis and molecular markers now make it possible to scientifically verify cotton origin and detect substitution or blending. Companies like GenuTrace™ provide laboratory-grade validation tools that complement digital chain-of-custody systems — ensuring that sustainability claims are measurable, repeatable, and defensible. Where appropriate, we plan to pair our chain-of-custody records with physical or forensic testing to confirm origin claims. Not every shipment, not every style, but enough to keep everyone honest, including us. Traceability, properly understood, is not a marketing feature; it's the backbone that makes every other claim stand up.
Factories Built for Transparency, Not Opacity
You can’t have a sustainable, traceable product if your factories are black boxes. That’s why we are designing our manufacturing footprint — from our underwear facility under development in South India to future capacity in the U.S. — around visibility. Not just CCTV and dashboards, but clear standards on hours, wages, safety, and energy use that we can monitor and improve.
In practice, wages and working conditions are part of sustainability, too. A “green” factory that runs on cheap labor and fear is not sustainable by any serious definition of the word. At Grey Matter, we are aligning our costing and planning so that decent wages and legal hours fit into the business model rather than sitting in the “aspirational” column of a slide deck. We are not going to pretend we’ve solved every labor issue in the industry. Still, we are making sure that the way we place orders doesn’t make it impossible for our partners to do the right thing.
Energy and machinery tie our sustainability and traceability goals back to policy reality. New, efficient machinery is cleaner and often easier to monitor—but tariffs and trade barriers can make those investments more expensive in the very countries trying to build or modernize capacity. We design around that constraint: targeting efficient equipment where we can, working with partners on renewable power where available, and advocating for trade policies that don't punish mills for upgrading. Sustainability starts looking less like a lifestyle choice and more like an industrial policy problem once you step onto the factory floor.
Owning the Trade-Offs Instead of Hiding Them
One of the most damaging myths in our industry is that a brand can be “100% sustainable.” It can’t. Not if it’s making physical product at scale. The honest questions are: where are we improving, where are we stuck, and what trade-offs are we making on purpose rather than by default?
At Grey Matter, we put those trade-offs on the table. We still use synthetic components in socks and waistbands because comfort, recovery, and durability matter. We ship goods across borders because that's where capacity exists, and we don't pretend that logistics emissions vanish because we run a carbon calculator. We know that lower price points can pull us toward cheaper, less-documented materials if we don't deliberately resist that pull.
Our approach is to measure, disclose, and improve rather than promise miracles. Over time, that means being more explicit about fiber mixes, country of origin, and key processing stages. It means prioritizing a smaller set of credible certifications and audit frameworks instead of chasing every logo on the market. It also means saying “no” when a program or partner would force us to compromise traceability or basic standards, even if the margin looks attractive.
The consumer side matters, but in a way that differs from how typical ESG communication assumes. The men buying our basics aren't sitting down to read life-cycle assessments. We make clothes that feel good, wear well, and don't leave customers thinking they're backing something they’d rather avoid. Every claim must be supported by real data or third-party verification, not wishful thinking. When we don’t have an answer, we'll say so and go find it. That may not read like neat hangtag copy, but it's how you earn trust and keep it.
Turning Data Into Responsibility, Not Just Content
If sustainability and traceability are to mean anything, the data we collect must change how we run our business, not just how we tell the story. Otherwise, we are just upgrading from vague claims to more specific, but equally cosmetic, ones.
For Grey Matter, that means using traceability data to influence buying and design choices. If we see that specific fiber sources or processing routes consistently show higher impacts or weaker documentation, we phase them out. If audit findings reveal recurring issues in a facility, we work to fix them. If that fails, we move on. Data becomes a filter for who gets our volume, not just a footnote on a sustainability report.
We also want to use our size as an advantage. Being smaller and more focused means our partners are not anonymous vendors in a crowded matrix; they are known names with shared stakes in long-term success. That creates room for honest conversations: how do we structure orders so they can maintain decent wages? How do we handle unexpected demand without forcing inhumane overtime? How do we jointly plan investments in cleaner machinery or better wastewater treatment?
Long-term, we see product-level transparency becoming standard. QR codes or digital product passports that tell you something meaningful — not just a promotion, but the key waypoints from fiber to finished garment. We're not going to pretend we have that perfect system in place today, but that's the direction of travel. The goal is not to feed a marketing feed; it's to make it harder, structurally more complex, for bad practices to hide.
What Comes Next
Grey Matter Concepts is still in its early stages compared to the industry giants we compete with. That’s a risk, but it's also an opportunity. We don’t have to retrofit an old, opaque supply chain to meet new expectations. We can build for sustainability and traceability from the start, even if that slows growth in the short term.
The road ahead will be messy. Rules will change. Cotton will have good years and bad. Power will get cheap and then expensive again. Regulators will keep adding new lines to the rulebook.
The easy move is to paper over all of that with a simple story. We’d rather do the harder thing: spell out the trade-offs, say where the limits are, and keep closing the gap between our claims and the facts we can put on the table.
In the end, sustainability and traceability are not about winning awards or ticking boxes. They're about reducing real-world harm and increasing real-world benefits in a business that employs millions of people and touches landscapes across the globe.
At Grey Matter Concepts, we're under no illusion that we can fix the industry. But we can run our corner of it in a way that respects workers, doesn't insult our customers' intelligence, and holds our own claims to the same standard of scrutiny we apply to everyone else.
If that sounds less dramatic than the usual sustainability campaign, that's fine. We're in the basics business. Quiet reliability is the point.
About Robert P. Antoshak
Bob Antoshak is a seasoned textile and apparel executive with more than 30 years of experience shaping global sourcing strategies and industry transformation. As Vice President of Global Strategic Sourcing & Development at Grey Matter Concepts, he leads innovation in supply chain strategy, supplier partnerships, and operational performance.
Formerly a Partner at Gherzi Textil Organisation, Bob supported global clients with strategic insights, advisory work, and thought leadership that influenced sourcing models and sustainability practices across the value chain. His career includes roles in government advisory, marketing, M&A, trade policy, and strategic sourcing, including service as an FBI-cleared industry advisor on major U.S. trade negotiations.
He is a widely recognized contributor to key industry publications, including Just-Style, Sourcing Journal, and Fiber2Fashion.
