Clothing manufacturer in Bangladesh for Icelandic brands

No, and any supplier who says otherwise is selling you something. Iceland abolished customs duty on clothing and footwear on 1 January 2016: the finance ministry cut 324 tariff lines covering clothing and shoes to zero that year, the customs notice lists the knitted and woven apparel headings at 0%, and the WTO tariff profile shows Iceland’s average applied duty on clothing at 0.0% with every line duty-free. A garment made in Bangladesh, Portugal, Turkey or China enters Iceland on identical terms. Iceland does run a least-developed-country scheme under Regulation 119/2002 that grants Bangladesh duty-free access against a Form A certificate or an invoice declaration for consignments up to ISK 250,000, but for apparel it changes nothing today. What decides your landed cost here is the factory price, the freight and the 24% VAT.

Longer than to mainland Europe, because there is no direct service and the last leg is weekly. Cargo from Chattogram sails on a main-line service to a North Sea or Baltic port, roughly 22 to 30 days, then transships onto an Icelandic carrier: Eimskip’s Blue Line calls Rotterdam and Teesport with weekly departures to Reykjavík and Grundartangi, and its Yellow Line connects Immingham, Fredrikstad and Aarhus; Samskip runs Rotterdam, Cuxhaven, Gothenburg, Halmstad and Aarhus to Reykjavík with two vessels of about 900 TEU. The practical effect is that missing a sailing costs a week, not a day, so the ship date matters more here than almost anywhere. Ask for the routing and a committed ship date on the order confirmation, and remember that air freight into Keflavík takes two to five days before customs when a reorder cannot wait.

Iceland applies EU textile labelling through the EEA agreement: the Consumer Agency lists rules 220/2015 as implementing Regulation (EU) No 1007/2011, so fibre composition must be given by percentage using the regulation’s fibre names. Whether Icelandic itself is legally mandatory on the label is something we could not confirm from a primary source, and we will not assert a rule we have not read. The practical answer is to carry fibre content and care information in Icelandic alongside English, which removes the question for your retailer and for Neytendastofa, the Consumer Agency named above, before the goods are shipped. Country of origin is stated as Bangladesh. We prepare the artwork and ask your retailer to confirm the Icelandic wording before printing; keep the approved file so reorders carry the same label.

Not today. The Recycling Fee Act 162/2002 sets fees for packaging, tyres, vehicles, fishing gear and hazardous substances, and its current text has no textile category; the amendment bill presented to parliament in December 2025 does not add one. That is likely to change within a few years: an Icelandic environmental consultancy reported in April 2025 that the EU agreed textile producer responsibility in February 2025 and that Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein would presumably also have twenty months to implement it, most probably through the Recycling Fund. Schemes of that kind charge by weight placed on the market, so the numbers you will need are the garment weight and the quantity per style. Ask for both in writing with every order now, so when a fee arrives the first declaration comes from documents rather than estimates.

Add the factory price, freight, insurance and 24% VAT: Iceland has charged no customs duty on clothing since 1 January 2016, so there is no duty line to calculate. Iceland has two VAT rates, 24% standard and 11% reduced, and clothing is not on the reduced list, which covers food, books, accommodation, passenger transport and similar items, so garments carry 24% at import on the customs value and again at the till. Freight has to include a European transshipment leg, because no container line sails from Chattogram to Iceland and cargo reaches Reykjavík on weekly Eimskip or Samskip services. Ask for a DDP quote that shows the price per piece, the freight, the insurance and the VAT as separate lines.

Some do: Iceland is outside the EU but inside the European Economic Area, so EU textile labelling law applies through the EEA agreement, while Iceland abolished customs duty on clothing from every origin on 1 January 2016. The Consumer Agency, Neytendastofa, lists rules 220/2015 on textile names and labelling as Iceland’s implementation of Regulation (EU) No 1007/2011, so fibre composition is given by percentage using the regulation’s fibre names. Iceland also runs its own least-developed-country scheme under Regulation 119/2002, which would matter only if a tariff on clothing ever returned. EU textile producer responsibility is expected to follow: an Icelandic environmental consultancy reported in April 2025 that Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein would presumably have twenty months to implement it, most probably through the Recycling Fund.

Two kinds: outdoor and technical wear for visitors and residents who need it, and souvenir and branded apparel sold in volume through tourist retail. Iceland received about 2.27 million foreign passenger departures through Keflavík in 2025, with Americans the largest group at 662,000, then British at 229,000, Germans at 152,000 and Chinese at 128,000, staying 7.1 nights on average. Bangladesh is strong in souvenir apparel and in the knitted layers worn beneath outdoor gear: tees, hoodies, fleece, base layers and caps. Technical shells with taped seams are a different specialism, and the premium end is often made close to home: the Icelandic brand 66°North states that it has operated its own factories since 1926 with the majority of production in Europe.

About US$22 million of apparel in 2025, according to UN Comtrade figures published by Trading Economics: roughly US$13.4 million of knitted garments and US$8.5 million of woven ones. That clothing competes on equal terms with garments from anywhere, because Iceland has charged 0% duty on all clothing since 1 January 2016, so Bangladesh holds no tariff advantage there. What decides an order is the price per piece, the quality standard, the minimum and the calendar, and in Iceland the calendar means weekly sailings into Reykjavík after a European transshipment, so a missed sailing costs a week. For scale, Faxaflóahafnir, the Reykjavík port authority, handled 420,376 TEU of cargo in 2025.