August 2026: Suspending Shipping to the EU

New EU packaging waste regulations (PPWR), effective 12 August 2026

French version here.

Effective immediately, we have suspended shipping to addresses in European Union member countries.

This is not a decision we wanted to make. Our EU customers have been among our most engaged — practitioners who research materials carefully, ask detailed questions, and come back. Losing you matters to us.

This is not a shipping, customs, or tariff issue. Parcels to the EU move as reliably as they always have. The change is regulatory, and it applies to us as a seller rather than to your package.

What changed

On 12 August 2026, the EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) begins to apply. Under it, any business that ships packaged goods to an EU customer is treated as the "producer" of that packaging and must be registered in the destination country before selling. The regulation is EU-wide.

The administration is not. Each member state runs its own registration system, its own fee schedule, and its own annual reporting cycle across all twenty-seven. A seller based outside the EU must also appoint an authorized representative in each country it ships to. Separate registration, separate representative, separate filings, separate fees, per country, every year.

For a company operating at our scale, serving the EU countries as a whole would mean registering 27 times, maintaining 27 parallel compliance relationships. That is not a cost problem we can solve by working harder at it.

What we think about it

We do not object to the principle. Packaging waste is a real problem, and asking the companies that generate it to help pay for handling it is reasonable. Majority of our own packaging is already paper-based and minimal, and we would meet the material standards without difficulty.

The difficulty is structural. A regulation designed to harmonize standards across a single market has been implemented through twenty-seven separate administrations. Large exporters absorb that. Small ones stop shipping.

What happens now

Orders already placed will ship as normal. If you have an order in progress, nothing changes.

We are evaluating registration in the countries where most of our EU customers are. If the cost is workable, we will resume service to those countries first rather than all at once. We are not able to give a date yet, and we would rather say nothing than promise a timeline we cannot keep.

Wholesale and B2B is not affected.  If you are a retailer, studio, or school in the EU, you can continue to place orders as a business entity and send inquiries as usual. Under the regulation, an EU-established buyer takes on the packaging obligations for goods it brings to market, so this route remains open. Expect to have to file additional document to declare packaging material to your country's Custom as the "Importer of Record". Please contact us directly if you have question.

If you would like to know when we return to EU, email us and we will add you to the notification list for your country.

For our EU customers

Many of you have been with us since the beginning, and several have travelled to Japan to join our workshops in Daigo and have visited our shop. That relationship does not depend on a shipping route, and none of it is ending here.

Our workshops and travel programs are unaffected. We hope to see some of you in Japan regardless.

Thank you for your patience while we work through this.