Artists stop selling to the EU over new packaging rules

Illustrator Lauren Marx told her half-million Instagram followers she will stop selling her work in the European Union, citing new EU packaging rules that took effect this month.

Marx, who works in St. Louis and draws dense animal and nature scenes she sells as prints and stickers, addressed the note to her EU customers.

She wrote that the rules require registering in each country and paying individual fees, hiring authorized legal representatives, providing supply chain data, undergoing supply audits, redesigning packaging, submitting technical files, and complying with different reporting requirements.

The rule Marx cites is the 2024 Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, or PPWR, which began applying across the 27 EU member states on August 12. It treats whoever first places a packaged product on the EU market as its “producer,” including a U.S. seller that ships directly to a customer in France or Germany.

Article 45 requires those producers to appoint an authorized representative in each member state in which they sell. Producers register and pay packaging fees country by country, the obligation Marx refers to as EPR, or extended producer responsibility.

“Add all of this to the already insanely high shipping costs, continuing to sell to the EU is, currently, an impossible task,” Marx wrote.

Marx called the decision temporary and said she hoped the EU would bring in exemptions and softer rules for small businesses and creators.

The illustrator is not the first artist to pull out of the bloc. A separate EU rule, the General Product Safety Regulation, has pushed others out since it applied on December 13, 2024.

That rule requires an EU-based “responsible person” for consumer products and carries no exemption for small sellers.

Lisa Marie Robinson, a British artist who paints cats and other animals, stopped shipping to the EU and Northern Ireland the day the product-safety rule took effect.

“As a small, one-person business, meeting these requirements is about as feasible as fitting a giraffe in a Mini Cooper,” Robinson wrote.

Cathryn Worrell, a UK illustrator, first stopped EU sales at the end of 2024, then tried selling made-to-order prints on Etsy to stay within the rules. She gave up on that in August 2025.

“As a small one-person business, it’s too expensive for me to comply with these regulations,” Worrell wrote.

The Irish Independent reported over the weekend that artists, designers and craft makers across Ireland have suspended sales to other EU countries.

“First they said, don’t buy from China. Now it’s don’t buy from Europeans,” Natalija Kozlova Vinovrski, whose company Printarelle makes handmade personal gifts, told the newspaper. “They killed the whole purpose of the EU. It’s crazy.”

The EU has weighed easing the representative requirement, but not for sellers like Marx. In December 2025, the European Commission proposed suspending the packaging rule’s representative requirement until 2035 as part of a simplification package.

That proposed relief covered only producers based inside the EU. Producers in countries outside the bloc, including the United States, were left out.

The proposal then stalled. On June 24, the Council of the European Union said negotiations on the two producer-responsibility measures had been discontinued, citing “strong reservations by a vast majority of member states.”

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