Tied up in Red Tape

Some not so good news, I’m afraid. In a few days time (December 13th to be precise) new EU regulations kick in called GPSR (General Product Safety Regulation). This has rather caught us by surprise; we only heard about it because other hobby manufacturers started asking about them. There doesn’t seem to have been any news coverage about something that massively impacts smaller operations like ours. Without wishing to go into too many details, it covers product safety, but also (and here’s the killer) requires companies selling into the EU from outside to have a presence (a ‘responsible person’) within the EU. There’s a pretty good overview of things here if you really want to read more. Of course we don’t have any EU presence, since we’re not a multi-national mega-corporation with offices in every capital city. There are specialist companies that offer solutions to this and we’ve been given contact details for one or two (big shout-out goes to Andy Foster at Heresy Miniatures who has done a lot of leg-work which he’s kindly shared) but getting this in place will take a little bit of time (and will of course cost us money – we’re hoping it’s not so much that it makes EU sales impossible for us).

As a consequence we will be suspending sales to EU countries from next Thursday (November 28th). This also covers Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstien (the three countries in the EEA) who align with EU regulations. We may also have to suspend orders to Northern Ireland, as the Windsor Framework means that EU regs should apply there. This deadline will give us time to process and ship any outstanding EU orders and get them delivered before the new regs kick in. You’ll doubtless have seen similar notices from other indie hobby manufacturers saying similar things, so sadly EU customers are going to be out in the cold for a while.

We can’t guarantee what time of day the switch off will be, so don’t leave it too late (please don’t assume that it’ll all still be working at two minutes to midnight).