Import apparel and accessories
from Europe to the United Kingdom

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.

Three things decide what a UK import costs you. The first is duty, and here the UK is unusually favourable to European sourcing: under the UK–EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, goods of genuine EU origin can be imported at 0% duty when the exporter provides a statement on origin on the invoice, or when you hold importer's knowledge.

Miss the paperwork and your broker applies the UK Global Tariff instead — roughly 12% on cotton garments, around 16% on sports footwear, 0% on most electronics. The saving is real and it is administrative, which is why we push your suppliers for the origin wording before the goods move rather than after.

The second is import VAT at 20%, which applies to commercial imports regardless of value. If you are VAT-registered you will normally recover it, and postponed VAT accounting lets you account for it on your return instead of paying at the border — a cash-flow difference worth setting up before your first shipment.

The third is registration: you need a GB EORI number to import commercially, and the £135 consignment rule people quote from consumer articles is a supply-VAT rule for sales to consumers, not an exemption for a company's stock purchase.

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.