Fake Reviews Are Now Illegal: What UK Apparel Brands Should Do Instead
By The Velocity Wear Team
A new brand has a genuine problem: nobody has reviewed the product because nobody has bought it, and people are reluctant to buy a product nobody has reviewed. The historical shortcut was to manufacture the social proof. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 that is a banned practice in the UK, with the CMA able to enforce directly.
This is a rule we take seriously on our own site, which is why you will not find invented testimonials or a fabricated star rating on it. It is also, genuinely, not a hardship — the alternatives are better marketing.
What the Act prohibits
Broadly: submitting or commissioning fake reviews, publishing consumer reviews without taking reasonable steps to check they are genuine, and publishing incentivised reviews without clearly disclosing the incentive. Concealing that a review was paid for or rewarded is part of the problem, not a workaround for it.
The "reasonable steps" duty is the one that catches people out, because it applies to publishing as well as writing. Running an on-site review widget that anybody can submit to, with no verification, is not obviously enough.
Where clothing brands drift into it
- Friends and family reviews at launch, written with the best intentions and describing a product the writer received free.
- Gifting to a creator in exchange for a positive post with no disclosure. The gift is the incentive and it has to be disclosed.
- Aggregate rating markup on a product page where the underlying reviews do not exist or are not verified. This has search consequences as well as legal ones.
- Invented figures used as social proof — a customer count, a satisfaction percentage, a "most popular" badge on an item that is not.
- Recycling reviews across product pages so a new design inherits an older one's ratings.
What actually builds trust without reviews
Specificity. A new brand cannot borrow credibility from a crowd, so it has to earn it from detail — and detail is something you have and your larger competitors often obscure.
Publish the fabric weight in GSM. Publish flat measurements for every size. Say what the print method is and how to wash it. Show the garment on more than one body. Photograph it in daylight without heavy retouching. Every one of those signals a brand that knows its product, and collectively they do more for conversion than a row of anonymous five-star ratings.
Getting real reviews, properly
- 1Ask, by email, a sensible interval after delivery — long enough that they have worn it, short enough that they remember ordering it.
- 2Make it easy and make it optional. A one-click star with a free text box gets far more responses than a form.
- 3If you incentivise, disclose it clearly and do not condition the incentive on the review being positive. A discount for any review is defensible; a discount for a good review is not.
- 4Publish the mediocre ones. A page of unbroken five-star reviews reads as fake to shoppers whether or not it is, and a three-star review that says the fit runs small is genuinely useful to the next buyer.
- 5Keep the evidence of verification. If you are relying on order records to confirm reviewers are customers, that is your reasonable steps, and it is worth being able to demonstrate.
The commercial case, not just the legal one
Fabricated proof is also brittle. It has to be maintained, it cannot be pointed at in detail, and it collapses badly if noticed. A brand built on published specifications, honest photography and real feedback has nothing to maintain and nothing to lose.
And the underlying product decisions get easier too. When you cannot claim popularity, you compete on the things you can state as facts — a 240 GSM ring-spun tee, a 450 GSM heavyweight fleece, a 20-piece minimum, a 10 to 15 working day production window. Those are checkable, which is exactly why they persuade.
