Textiles, clothing and footwear

Light industry is the EAEU term for soft goods, and TR CU 017/2011 is the regulation that governs them: textiles and knitted fabric, clothing, footwear, leather and fur goods, machine-made carpets, and textile accessories. The regulation offers two approval documents, and which one applies is settled by how much of the product touches the skin. First-layer items in direct contact with skin, underwear, hosiery, T-shirts and bed linen, need a Certificate of Conformity. Second and third layer, meaning limited contact and outerwear, need a Declaration. A T-shirt certifies. A shirt declares.

Almost nothing fails on the test bench. It fails on the two lines that describe the product. GOST standards prescribe different test methods for different materials, so a declared composition that does not match the garment sends the laboratory to the wrong method and produces a failure by construction. Every component counts, including lining, padding, threads and trims, and 3 to 5 percent of synthetic fibre can change the whole test programme. The ±5 percent tolerance on declared composition is a tolerance, not a rounding convention. The rest are label failures: text missing in the Union's working language, wrong care symbols, an absent EAC mark.

Childrenswear is a different regime rather than a stricter one. TR CU 007/2011 covers everything made for children under 14 and teenagers aged 14 to 18, and it sits alongside TR CU 017 instead of replacing it. A certificate under it always requires a factory audit. It adds label fields of its own, and items for newborns and underwear for children under one must state that washing before first use is obligatory. Hygienic limits are where these products actually die: synthetic content that passes elsewhere fails hygroscopicity testing under GOST, and dye and vapour migration are assessed.

Clothing gets no acceptance of foreign test reports. Testing happens inside the EAEU because the law requires it, it takes about two weeks, it needs several samples of each position, and one failed result fails the product outright. Samples must be finished and ready for sale, unworn and unwashed, and every item needs a label or the laboratory cannot match it to the application. The articles below work through the layers, the label fields, sample shipping and the factory audit. If you have a composition breakdown and a photograph of the label, send both and we will tell you what will fail.