EU-Sourced, EU Origin, Original Packaging: What Each One Means

Two questions that an offer has to answer separately

Where did you buy this stock? Where was it made? Those are different questions with different answers and different consequences, and an offer email that runs them together is doing you no favours. The first describes a supply chain. The second is a finding in customs law with a duty bill attached to it.

Putting a container on a truck in Madrid changes nothing about the second question. Neither does buying from a Spanish company, nor invoicing in euro, nor holding pallets in a warehouse outside the city. All of that is channel. Manufacture is origin, and manufacture happens in a factory, wherever that factory happens to be.

Since we have a plain commercial interest in how this subject is framed, our own disclosure belongs at the top rather than buried at the bottom. Iguazu Trading buys genuine brand-owner stock within the European market and ships it worldwide, still in the manufacturer's own sealed packaging. No brand owner has appointed, licensed, authorised or endorsed us. What follows is written so that you can put the same questions to us that you should be putting to everyone else quoting you.

Treat this as practitioner guidance rather than legal advice. Where something turns on the particular facts of a particular consignment, get advice and check the current text of the instruments referred to below.

Origin is a customs finding, not a description of the brand

Goods acquire origin in one of two ways: they are wholly obtained somewhere, or they undergo working or processing somewhere that is substantial enough to satisfy whichever rule applies to that product. Two separate systems then use that finding for two separate purposes, and the European Commission is careful to keep them apart.

Under the non-preferential system, origin exists so that most-favoured-nation treatment and commercial policy measures can be applied — anti-dumping duty, quotas, safeguards, origin marking on the pack. No duty advantage attaches to it. This is what a chamber of commerce certifies.

Under the preferential system, origin exists to decide whether goods qualify as originating in a country the EU has an arrangement with. Qualify, and the goods can be imported at a lower rate or at nothing. This is the system buyers have in mind when they ask about origin, and it is the one where loose language turns into an unbudgeted duty bill.

Three things follow, and each of them is expensive to learn the hard way.

The trademark is silent on the question. Brands most people file mentally as European are frequently made on several continents for several regions, and one article can carry a different origin depending on which plant filled it. What decides the answer is where the manufacturing took place, not who owns the name over the door — goods made in an EU factory qualify regardless of the label's nationality, and goods made elsewhere do not qualify however European the name sounds. A single mixed container can quite legitimately carry preferential proof on some lines and none on others.

A supplier who cannot obtain a EUR.1 for a line is usually telling you the truth. The likeliest explanation is that the goods were manufactured outside the Union and therefore fail the agreement's origin rule. That is a property of the product rather than a shortcoming of the seller, and an honest no is worth considerably more to you than an accommodating yes that produces a document your clearing agent rejects.

Your market decides which proof counts

Sellers do not select the instrument; agreements do. Depending on which arrangement covers your destination, preference may be claimed on a EUR.1 movement certificate endorsed by the exporting country's customs authority, on a EUR-MED certificate where the pan-Euro-Mediterranean cumulation rules apply, on wording the exporter writes onto the invoice, or on a statement made by an exporter registered under the REX scheme. Invoice wording is open to any exporter for consignments of originating goods worth up to €6,000; beyond that threshold, only an exporter holding approved status may use it.

Some agreements dispense with certificates altogether. Trade between the EU and the United Kingdom runs on a statement made out by the exporter or on the importer's own knowledge of originating status; asking for a EUR.1 on that corridor produces a document nobody wants. And a good many markets have no preferential arrangement with the EU at all, in which case the duty is whatever the tariff says and no piece of paper alters it.

Settle this before a price is agreed, not after a booking is made. The Commission's Access2Markets service will tell you, against your own commodity code and your own destination, whether an arrangement exists and which proof it expects. Our document-by-document export reference covers how the evidence is then assembled for a live consignment.

The channel question: why an independent may sell branded goods

The legal foundation is exhaustion of rights, set out at Article 15 of the EU trade mark regulation, Regulation (EU) 2017/1001. A proprietor cannot rely on an EU trade mark to prevent its use for goods that the proprietor has already placed on the European Economic Area market, or consented to placing there. Directive (EU) 2015/2436 applies the same reasoning to marks registered nationally.

Every element of that does work. Exhaustion attaches to the specific goods, never to the brand as a whole. The territory that triggers it is the EEA — the Union together with Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway — and a first sale in Dubai or Sao Paulo does not count. And the trigger is the proprietor's own act or agreement, which is exactly why asking a supplier to name the market a consignment was first sold into is the most informative single question available to a buyer.

Article 15 then carves out an exception that is easy to skim past. Where the proprietor has legitimate reasons to object to further dealing in the goods — the clearest case being goods whose condition has been altered or damaged since they were marketed — exhaustion falls away. That provision is what converts repacking, re-boxing and over-labelling from a cosmetic matter into a legal one.

Exhaustion is also territorial, and the map changed recently. Britain has operated an asymmetric regime since 2021: goods marketed anywhere in the EEA are exhausted for UK purposes and can be parallel imported into Britain, while goods first marketed in Britain are not exhausted across the EEA and a rightsholder can object to their arrival there. The direction of travel changes the analysis, which is one more reason the market of first sale belongs on the offer in writing.

Genuine, parallel, grey, counterfeit

Four words get used as if they were interchangeable, and the differences between them are legal rather than rhetorical.

Genuine answers a question about the article: made by the brand owner or to their order, in the pack their line filled. Parallel answers a question about the route: real goods travelling through a distribution channel the brand owner never designed. Within the EEA that is simply what a single market plus exhaustion produces — nothing about it is irregular, and the trade mark cannot be used to interrupt it.

Grey is where precision collapses. Depending on who is speaking, it can mean perfectly lawful parallel trade being described unflatteringly; or stock originally marketed outside the EEA and imported without the rightsholder agreeing, where the exhaustion analysis simply does not apply; or a purely commercial mismatch with no legal content whatever, such as artwork in the wrong language, an unfamiliar pack size, a date format your staff misread, or an on-pack promotion nobody in your market can redeem. Three risk profiles, one word. Hearing it should open a conversation, not close one.

Counterfeit sits outside all three, and it has a statutory meaning. Regulation (EU) No 608/2013, which governs customs enforcement of intellectual property rights, reaches goods carrying, without authorisation, a sign identical to a validly registered mark for that type of goods or indistinguishable from it in its essentials; goods infringing a protected geographical indication; and separately supplied packaging, labels, stickers, leaflets, guarantee documents and comparable items bearing such a sign.

That last category is the one importers underestimate. Because the regulation catches the wrapping on its own terms, an authority can detain a shipment on the strength of the outer cases alone. Anyone who has been reassured that the goods inside are perfectly fine and only the carton is a reproduction has not been offered a bargain; they have been offered a seizure.

Sealed packaging, and the moment it stops being sealed

What we mean by the manufacturer's own packaging is narrow and deliberate: the pack their line filled and closed, in their artwork, carrying the lot or batch coding, durability marking and statutory information they printed — and, in most consumer categories, the shipper case they assembled those units into.

It stops being that at several identifiable moments. Decanting units into a plain outer. Splitting a case to make up a different count. Applying a label over information the manufacturer printed. Obliterating or removing the coding. Swapping a display outer for a generic one. Each of those alters the condition of the goods after they were marketed, which is precisely the situation Article 15's carve-out contemplates, and each one severs a traceability link that cannot be reconstructed afterwards. None of it happens here, which is a statement about our own handling rather than an allegation about anyone else's.

Destination labelling is a separate matter and an entirely soluble one. Food marketed in the EU carries the particulars required by Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 in a language the consumers of that member state readily understand. Cosmetics carry what Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 requires, including the name and address of a responsible person established in the Union. Your own market may then demand an additional overlay. Decide before loading who applies it, at which point in the chain, and whether it will sit anywhere near text the manufacturer printed — a five-minute conversation at quotation stage and a very expensive one at a port. Skincare and beauty lines and ambient grocery raise it most often.

Lot coding earns its keep exactly once

Regulation (EC) No 178/2002, the Union's general food law, obliges operators to make food and feed traceable through every stage of production, processing and distribution. In practice that resolves into a single working requirement: know who supplied you, know who you supplied, and produce that information for the competent authorities when asked.

For an importer the obligation is not administrative housekeeping. It is what determines whether a manufacturer's withdrawal is a bad week or a catastrophe. When specific lots are pulled, your regulator and your own customers will want an answer in hours, and the only inexpensive way to give one is a packing list that already carries the coding, supported by photographs taken of the coding on the actual pallets before the doors were closed. Those photographs cost nothing on the day and end arguments a year later. Related ground is covered among the questions buyers raise before a first order.

Interrogating a supplier, ourselves included

None of the following asks anyone to expose their own sourcing relationships, and a company that knows what is sitting on its racking can answer all of them inside a paragraph. How quickly the reply comes back is itself a data point.

• Name the EU or EEA market this consignment was placed on, and put it on the offer.
• Was it bought inside the Union or imported into it? Either answer can be perfectly sound; hesitation is the signal, not the answer.
• Will lot coding go onto the packing list, and will photographs of it arrive before the container is closed?
• Which statutory particulars appear on the pack, and in what languages?
• Which proof of origin travels with this shipment, and will my destination's arrangement with the EU actually accept it?
• If a lot is withdrawn once the goods have landed, what happens next, and who does it?
• Do you assert any appointment, authorisation, licence or partnership from the brand owner? If so, tell me who at the brand owner granted it.

The final question is blunt on purpose. A company that says dozens of unrelated manufacturers have each appointed it is revealing how loosely it uses words generally.

The reliable warning signs are behavioural, which is convenient, because reading conduct requires no laboratory. Evasion about which country the stock came from, when naming a country reveals nothing commercially sensitive. Paperwork available only once money has moved, when drafts, specimens and pack photographs all exist beforehand. Authorisation claims that evaporate the second time you ask. Batch formats that disagree with one another inside a single pallet; artwork belonging to a market the seller insists these goods never came from; cases opened and re-taped. Remittance instructions in a different company's name, a personal account, or a jurisdiction with no connection to the invoice. And silence lasting a week on a traceability question, because a business that cannot establish what it holds will be no use to you at the moment it matters.

Our own answers to our own questions

Genuine brand-owner stock, in the manufacturer's own sealed packaging, sold by the case, by the pallet or as a full container load, to trade buyers exporting to every continent. Nothing is re-boxed and nothing is relabelled. We will identify the European market a consignment came from, put lot coding on the packing list, and photograph the built pallets before the doors close.

On origin, EUR.1 movement certificates are issued where lines qualify on EU preferential origin under an arrangement your market can actually use, and Certificates of Origin where the required proof is non-preferential. Where a line qualifies for neither, we say so rather than promising a document that cannot be obtained. Trading terms are EXW Madrid, FOB, CFR, CIF or DAP, with deep-sea loading through Valencia or Barcelona.

We make no claim to be any brand's official, authorised or appointed distributor. It would not be true, and in any event the phrase carries no weight unless the brand owner is the party saying it. We are an independent distributor of genuine brand-owner stock. Brand names and trade marks belong to their proprietors and appear here solely to describe goods offered for sale.

Where that distinction matters to a procurement policy — and it ought to — see our approach to authenticity and compliance, look through the categories held, or open a trade account.