It is with a heavy heart, a great deal of frustration, and absolute clarity that we are making an announcement we hoped we would never have to write: we are suspending all sales and shipments of our tablet wall mounts to customers in the European Union.
This was not a decision taken lightly. European tech enthusiasts, business owners, and smart-home installers have been a vital part of our community for years. However, a wave of dogmatic regulatory shifts coming out of Brussels has effectively forced our hand.
The tipping point is the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), alongside stricter Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) mandates. While the intention behind reducing environmental waste is undeniable, the execution of this legislation is a classic case of wide-brush policy-making that completely ignores the reality of small businesses.
Here is an honest look at why the numbers no longer add up, and why shipping our mounts to the EU has become unsustainable.
We’re Doing Everything Right: 100% Recyclable Packaging
What makes this decision particularly bitter is that our packaging is already as environmentally friendly as it gets.
We don’t use single-use plastics, foam inserts, or heavy laminates. 100% of our packaging is either paper or cardboard—right down to the paper-based adhesive tape we use to seal the boxes. Everything we ship to your door is 100% kerbside recyclable.
Yet under PPWR, simply doing the right thing for the planet isn’t enough. The regulation isn’t actually interested in whether your packaging is eco-friendly; it demands that you participate in complex, costly administrative frameworks to prove it across every individual EU nation!
DEJA VU: GPSR
This isn’t our first encounter with Brussels’ bureaucratic overreach. We have already swallowed significant costs and administrative headaches to comply with the EU’s General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR).
To meet GPSR demands as a non-EU business, we have to pay a third-party intermediary to act as our designated “EU Responsible Person”, review our product labeling and online listings across multiple languages, and maintain extensive technical risk documentation for simple, 3D printed products.
We absorbed those GPSR fees so we could keep serving our European customers. But adding PPWR on top of GPSR creates a cumulative cost stack that no micro-enterprise can survive.
Why PPWR Makes EU Sales Unsustainable
To legally ship a single 3D printed tablet mount into an EU member state under the new packaging framework now requires navigating up to 27 separate national databases, each with its own language, rules, and filing fees. Because there is no single EU-wide registration system, non-EU businesses are often forced to retain official in-country legal representatives purely to handle packaging filings. These legal retainers cost hundreds—sometimes thousands—of Euros per country, per year.
Because these registration fees and compliance retainers are fixed upfront costs, shipping small volumes to customers in countries like Germany or Ireland means the compliance overhead per mount far exceeds the retail price of the product itself.
There are no sensible threshold exemptions for independent businesses. The EU treats a small firm shipping a dozen parcels a year with the exact same heavy-handed rules as a corporate giant shipping millions.
Regulation That Crushes Small Businesses
The tragic irony of dogmatic regulation is that it crushes smaller players while massive conglomerates—with dedicated legal departments and huge compliance budgets—barely notice.
We firmly believe in protecting the environment, which is why we built our business around 100% recyclable, plastic-free packaging. But when regulations prioritize red tape and costly legal retainers over actual sustainability, the result isn’t a greener market—it’s a market where small businesses are priced out entirely. Passing these compliance fees on to you would mean charging at least £200 for a tablet mount that should cost £40.
What Happens Next?
Effective immediately, we have disabled shipping to EU destinations on our eBay listings. eBay was already the only way we could handle the complexities of shipping to the EU after Brexit but, that’s a whole other story!
To all our existing customers and supporters across Europe: thank you for buying from us over the years. We are deeply sorry that we can no longer serve you directly. Should European policymakers introduce sensible micro-enterprise thresholds or unified single-window registration systems in the future, we will be the first in line to turn EU shipping back on.
Until then, our focus remains on delivering the best 3D printed tablet wall mounts possible to the markets where independent businesses can still operate without being buried in bureaucracy.
