Impact of the GPSR

Today we’re bringing SAD news for our EU & NI customers. 

You may have seen rumblings and posts online within the small business community about new EU guidelines coming into force this month.

General Product Safety Regulations (GPSR) are taking effect on 13th December. This has been in the pipeline for years (apparently – all due to Brexit 🙄) but no-one thought to mention it to small businesses, who are going to be massively impacted by the new rules and are only now finding out about it.

The short story is: from 13th December we will no longer be able to sell to countries within the European Union and Northern Ireland. Hopefully this will just be temporary until we get clearer information or find a workable solution.

The long story is: these new GPSR regulations are replacing older safety regs and are being put in place to ensure that all sales placed in the EU meet modern safety standards.

This is all fair enough (of course we all want our products to be safe), and there are a number of things we would need to put in place on our products – such as updated safety information and compliance on labels and packaging which we can of course implement if that was the only condition.

The main issue however, is that all businesses selling products (‘Product’ means any item intended for consumers or likely to be used by consumers, whether in return for payment or free of charge), must have an Authorised Representative based in the European Union or Northern Ireland who acts as a compliance contact and ensures the products meet EU requirements.

We don’t have the financial resources to employ someone to fulfil this requirement and the fines that we will be liable for if we break this law are enormous. Which means that we (alongside many other UK small business that we know of) are no longer able to sell to our wonderful European Union or Northern Ireland customers.

Weirdly this also applies to digital download products too!

We are devastated. We have come to know our European customers well and we are so sad we will no longer be able to provide you with our products.

We will be temporarily changing our delivery settings on the website so that anyone within the European Union or Northern Ireland won’t be able to place an order. If for any reason one comes through we will have to refund and cancel the order.

We will suspend taking orders from 13th December, so if you would like to order before then, please do.

We’re so very sorry. We didn’t vote for Brexit, we loved being part of the European Union and we are desperately hoping there will be a change of terms and conditions with these new regulations and we will of course let you know of any updates as soon as we have them.