GPSR One Year On: the Responsible Person Question, Answered
The EU General Product Safety Regulation for importers — who counts as the responsible economic operator, what the label must show, and what changed in practice.
Bolang Solutions is a trading company. We chose the model on purpose: it lets us buy across many factories instead of selling you one production line, inspect goods we don't manufacture, and put our own name on every export document as seller of record. The industry's trading-company horror stories are concealment stories — so we run the opposite playbook: registered scope public, address public, and a standing invitation to verify us on gsxt.gov.cn the same way we verify suppliers.
Source: https://bolangast.com/about, retrieved 2026-08-11
On shipments we trade, the commercial invoice, packing list and bill of lading carry Bolang as seller of record. One counterparty, legally on the hook, answering in English.
Verify us the way we verify suppliers — our registered name, address and Unified Social Credit Code are published on this site; look us up on gsxt.gov.cn.
GPSR has been in force since December 2024, and the question that still stalls shipments is the same one it launched with: who is the responsible person in the EU, and is their name on the product? The regulation is broad; the operational core for importers is narrow enough to state plainly.
The operational core
A responsible economic operator established in the EU must exist for the product — manufacturer's EU entity, importer, authorised representative, or fulfilment provider in defined cases — and their name and contact details go on the product or its packaging/documents. Traceability information (type, batch or serial) must allow identification. Online listings carry the same information duties. No EU-established operator, no compliant placing on the market — that is the sentence that stops goods.
What this means at specification time
The label block is a spec line: responsible person's details, traceability marks, language requirements per member state — decided before printing, because relabelling at destination is the expensive version. For sellers without their own EU entity, an authorised-representative arrangement is the standard route. We will tell you which route applies to your product; appointing the representative is a contract between you and them, not something we sign on your behalf.
Common questions
No — the marketplace has its own duties, but the responsible-operator requirement attaches to the product; listings without the details get removed.
Consumer products broadly, yes — "simple" products are exactly where the labelling gap is most common.
No: CE marks conformity for regulated categories; GPSR is the general safety net across consumer products. A product can need both regimes' attention.
Related
Two ways to start
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