Clothing manufacturer in Bangladesh for Latvian brands

A tax on clothing by weight, already in force

Since 1 July 2024, textile products placed on the Latvian market have been subject to the natural resources tax at €0.50 per kilogram. The legal definition is broad: clothing, household textiles, textile accessories and footwear. The tax is charged on whoever first places the goods on the Latvian market, which for imported clothing is usually the importer.

There is a way out, and most businesses should take it. Under section 9.1 of the Natural Resources Tax Law, a company is exempt if it runs its own collection and recycling system for the textiles it sells, or signs an agreement with a certified waste manager to do so. A compliance firm cites Cabinet Regulation No. 359 of 11 June 2024 as the rulebook for that scheme; we have not read the regulation ourselves, so check the detail with your adviser. Either way, the figure you need is the weight of each garment and the quantity per style, and we put both on every order file and packing list, so the declaration is made from documents rather than a guess.

• Rate: €0.50 per kilogram of textiles placed on the market
• In force: since 1 July 2024
• Covers: clothing, household textiles, textile accessories and footwear
• Exemption: your own collection and recycling system, or an agreement with a certified waste manager
• What you need: garment weight and quantity per style, which we supply on every order

21% VAT

Latvia’s standard VAT rate is 21%. The reduced rate of 12% covers medicines, baby food, accommodation, domestic transport and some fresh produce, and the 5% rate covers certain books and magazines; clothing and footwear are on neither list, so they carry 21%. The one recent change, a temporary 12% rate on bread, milk, fresh poultry and eggs from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027, does not touch clothing.

Labels in Latvian

Labels and instructions for goods sold in Latvia must be in Latvian, under the detailed rules of the Consumer Rights Protection Law, and Regulation (EU) No 1007/2011 separately requires the fibre composition in the official language of the country of sale. So the sewn-in label carries fibre content and care instructions in Latvian, with other languages allowed alongside; a label shared across the three Baltic states can carry Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian together if each is complete.

• Fibre composition by percentage, in Latvian
• Care instructions in Latvian, as symbols with text
• Country of origin: Bangladesh
• Lithuanian and Estonian alongside, for a Baltic-wide label

Packaging: tax, or a scheme

Packaging follows the same logic as textiles. Whoever first sells packaged goods in Latvia owes natural resources tax on the packaging, and a contract with a scheme such as Latvijas Zaļais punkts removes that tax, covering glass, metal, wood, paper and cardboard, and plastic. A business placing more than 300 kg of packaging a year on the market must also arrange its recycling. For clothing that means the polybags, cartons, hangers and swing tags, and we supply their weights by material on every packing list.

The Freeport of Riga

The Freeport of Riga handled a record 501,851 TEU in 2024 and 495,748 TEU in 2025, down 1.2%, with total port cargo of 16.75 million tonnes in 2025. The first eight months of 2026 were down 23.5% on the same period of 2025, most of it a 44.2% fall in empty containers rather than in goods. The port authority names Baltic Container Terminal and Riga Universal Terminal as its two largest container terminals; Baltic Container Terminal, a privately owned 57-hectare site open around the clock, says it handles more than 30% of the Baltic states’ container cargo.

No line sails from Chattogram to Riga direct. Cargo moves on a main-line service to a North Sea port and transships onto a Baltic feeder: Ocean Network Express, for example, has run a weekly loop of Rotterdam, Klaipėda, Riga, Tallinn and Kotka since January 2025. Sea freight to the North Sea takes roughly 22 to 30 days before the feeder leg. Air freight into Riga takes two to five days before customs.

A sewing country that also buys

Latvia’s own clothing industry is mostly contract sewing for other European brands: the investment agency LIAA counts 1,896 companies and about 8,923 workers in textiles and clothing, producing 2.5% of manufacturing output in 2023. That shapes what Latvian buyers source abroad. Tailored and small-batch work can be sewn at home; volume basics, jersey and knitwear are where a Bangladeshi factory’s scale shows in the price. Latvia’s direct imports of Bangladeshi apparel are small, about US$1.5 million in 2025, and we could not find a verifiable explanation for how the rest of Latvian retail is supplied, so we do not offer one.

Working with us from Latvia

For a Latvian order we prepare the Latvian label, the REX statement for duty-free entry, and the garment weights your natural resources tax declaration or scheme contract is calculated from.