Import apparel and accessories
from Europe to Australia

The buying model changed and it changed in your favour. Wholesale marketplaces — Ankorstore, Orderchamp, Faire's European catalogue — put thousands of European brands behind one login with minimums a small boutique can meet, which is a different world from the days of trade fairs and territory-wide minimums. Alongside them sit the stock and multibrand distributors such as Brandsdistribution and BigBuy, useful for branded overstock rather than current season, and the manufacturing regions that still matter: knitwear and footwear in northern Portugal, leather and tailoring in Italy, and the Spanish supply base around Galicia and the Valencia region.

The consequence for a buyer is a many-suppliers, small-order pattern, which is exactly where a European address earns its keep. Twelve brands shipping to twelve destinations is twelve freight bills; twelve brands shipping to one address in Spain, Italy, France, Germany or Portugal is one consolidated shipment with one set of documents. It also lets you order the way the platforms are designed to be ordered — small, frequent, reactive to what actually sells — instead of forcing every buy into a container-sized decision.

Australia draws a clear line. At or below a customs value of A$1,000 there is no customs duty and no import processing charge. Above it, the Australian Border Force assesses duty, GST and the processing charge at the border before release, with MFN duty around 5% on most clothing, footwear, leather goods and hand tools, and 0% on a lot of electronics. The Australia–EU free trade agreement was concluded in March 2026 but has not entered into force, so plan on MFN rates and treat any preference as future upside rather than a line in your costing.

GST is where the business case differs from the consumer one. There is no GST-free threshold: 10% applies either way. Below A$1,000 it is collected under the vendor-collection model — by the seller, the platform or the redeliverer, which is what a forwarding service is. Above A$1,000 it is assessed at the border. The good news for a company is that if you hold an ABN and are registered for GST, import GST is normally claimable as an input tax credit, so it becomes a cash-flow item rather than a cost. Give us your ABN and GST status at onboarding and we will reflect it in how your shipments are documented.

Apparel is the category where customs treatment hits hardest, and where doing the paperwork properly pays best. Textile duty rates are among the highest in most tariff schedules — think roughly 12% into the UK on cotton garments and 16–18% into Canada — which makes preferential origin the single most valuable document in your file. Where an agreement exists between the EU and your market (the TCA for the UK, CETA for Canada, the EU agreements covering Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Israel), genuine EU-origin goods can enter at a preferential rate when the supplier issues the origin declaration. That is why we chase suppliers for origin wording during intake instead of treating it as an afterthought: on a textile order it is often worth more than the entire freight cost.

The second thing to plan is labelling. Selling apparel in your market usually means meeting local rules on fibre composition, care instructions, country of origin and the language they appear in. European labels are not automatically compliant elsewhere, and relabelling is far cheaper decided before an order than discovered after it lands. Operationally, apparel is light but bulky, so shipments price on volumetric weight — folded flat-pack goods consolidate well, hanging garments and footwear boxes do not. Tell us the format when you order and we will pack to reduce volume rather than simply boxing what arrives.