Selling clothing and textiles in the EU

None of these is a CE regime, which is why textile importers so often believe there is nothing to do. There is no marking, no notified body and no declaration of conformity; what there is instead is a set of obligations that only become visible when something goes wrong or when a customer asks.

The four layers land on different people. The labelling duty is on the manufacturer and passes to whoever places the product on the market under his own name; the REACH restrictions bind whoever places the article on the market; the GPSR operator has to be established in the Union; and EPR registration is per member state and per producer. An importer selling a private-label T-shirt into five countries carries all four, five times over for the last one.

Three details cause most of the failures. Only the names in Annex I may be used, so a brand’s own fibre name may appear alongside the harmonised name, not instead of it. The tolerances in Article 20 are narrow and specific: extraneous fibres up to 2% by weight (5% for carded products) need not be declared where they are technically unavoidable, and there is a manufacturing tolerance of 3% between the stated composition and the result of analysis. Neither is a licence to round.

And ‘100%’, ‘pure’ or ‘all’ may only be used where the product is composed exclusively of that fibre. The animal-origin statement exists because consumers who avoid fur and leather cannot see a horn button or a leather patch in an online photograph; it is a labelling rule with a small footprint and a high inspection rate. The duty is the manufacturer’s, and an importer who puts his own brand on the garment becomes the manufacturer for these purposes.

Entry 72 is usually described as the formaldehyde rule for textiles. That understates it badly. Entry 72 covers a list of CMR category 1A and 1B substances in textile articles, and formaldehyde is one line on that list; the rest includes cadmium and its compounds, chromium VI, arsenic, lead, benzene, quinoline and a series of phthalates and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, each with its own limit. Testing only for formaldehyde does not cover the entry.

Entry 79 is the one to plan for now. The limits are 25 µg/kg for the sum of PFHxA and its salts and 1,000 µg/kg for the sum of PFHxA-related substances, and they land on water-repellent and stain-resistant finishes. The duty is on whoever places the article on the EU market, and the date is weeks away from the date at the bottom of this page. If your outerwear supplier has not confirmed in writing which finish he uses, that is the question to send today.

The producer for EPR purposes is whoever first makes the product available on the market of a member state, which for imports is the importer or, in cross-border distance selling, the seller into that country. That means a separate registration, a separate identification number, periodic declarations of the quantities placed on the market and a fee, per country. It is administrative rather than technical, and it accumulates.

Two consequences of the EU-wide move. Fees will increasingly be modulated by eco-design criteria such as durability and recyclability, so the same garment can cost different amounts in different schemes. And distance sellers established outside a member state will generally need an authorised representative there, exactly as under WEEE and batteries. The transition dates are national, so check the scheme in each of your markets rather than assuming a single EU start date.

The mechanism is a market ban rather than a due diligence duty, which changes what preparation looks like. If an investigation concludes that a product was made with forced labour, the decision requires it to be withdrawn from the market and disposed of, and customs authorities stop further consignments. The loss is the goods, not a fine, and it falls on whoever holds them.

What that means for a textile importer with three years of lead time: know your supply chain beyond the first tier, because the risk usually sits at the fibre and yarn stage rather than at the cut-and-sew factory you visit. Keep documentary evidence of where the cotton or the fibre came from, and be able to produce it quickly; authorities will ask, and an operator who cannot answer is the easiest one to act against. Small and medium enterprises get support and proportionality in the procedure, not an exemption.

The technical documentation for a garment is lighter than for a machine but it is not nothing: a description of the product, the internal risk analysis, and the reports of any tests carried out, including the REACH testing. Drawstrings and cords on children’s clothing are the classic risk to analyse, and EN 14682 is the standard used for it.

For an importer the useful mental model is that the operator is a person an authority can reach and who has the file. Naming a service provider who has never seen a test report satisfies the form field and not the obligation. Where a product is found unsafe, the corrective measures are withdrawal, recall and direct information to consumers who can be traced, and it is the operator on the label who runs them.