Your Gateway toEurope

DIRECT SELLINGEUREXPERTS

Europe is not one market. It is 27 legal systems wearing the same flag.

End-to-end market entry for American & Asian direct sellers. Subsidiary · Legal · Compliance · Staffing

Same trade, 27 laws

Your independent distributor agreement will not cross a single border. Europe harmonised consumer law across all twenty-seven countries — but labour law stayed national, and each country shaped its own around whatever history it has with direct selling. The same person, doing the same work, sits in a different legal frame in every market you enter.

Population: Eurostat, 1 January 2025. Direct selling: WFDSA Global Statistical Report, 2024.

Complex, not complicated

Europe is complex, but not complicated. Complex means many moving parts that reward preparation. Complicated means random and unpredictable. Europe is the first one.

3 weeks → 6 months

The spread between the fastest and the most sophisticated European entries.

Fastest — Spain

Set-up inside three weeks. Multilevel selling is permitted outright under Ley 7/1996 — the work is drawing the line at venta piramidal and getting the plan on the right side of it.

Most sophisticated — Italy

A dedicated direct selling law on top of EU law. Legge 173/2005 regulates the seller's legal status, alongside ad hoc tax and social security provisions and a food supplement registration procedure that differs from the EU baseline.

Launch ready

Everything between the decision to enter Europe and the first compliant order.

01Market entry roadmap
Before anything gets drafted, we map every document, registration, legal dependency and owner for each country, and set a realistic launch date. It's the plan everyone works from, and it shows the gaps before a lawyer bills you for finding them.
02Subsidiary setup
Entity formation, registered office, banking, VAT and EORI registration, in the country that actually makes sense as your European base, not the one with the nicest brochure.
03Product compliance
Cosmetics notification and Responsible Person, food supplement dossiers, Novel Food status on the botanicals that quietly stop a launch, labelling, and a hard look at your marketing claims before a regulator takes one. We start early, because this step takes the longest.
04Legal & contracts
Distributor agreements, policies & procedures, terms of sale and withdrawal rights, localised with local counsel and checked clause by clause. The translation you're handed isn't always the version the lawyer approved.
05Compensation plan localisation
Starter fees, commissions, currency and inventory rules, adapted to each country's direct selling law. In Italy, for example, a fee can pay for systems and services, never for "the right to be a distributor".
06Data privacy & GDPR
Privacy policy, cookie consent, data processing agreements with your field, international transfers, and a straight answer on whether you need a DPO or an EU representative.
07Logistics & fulfilment
Choosing and onboarding the right 3PL partner, then setting up and test-running the whole chain: import, customs clearance, duties, warehousing, last-mile delivery and returns. Your products clear the border on time, without surprise duties, and go straight to the customer's door.
08Field onboarding & registration
Identity checks at sign-up, mandatory distributor ID cards, authority notifications and cooling-off rights. These are the country-specific rules that decide whether your first distributor can legally knock on a door.
09Staffing & headhunting
Country managers, field leaders and back-office hires, found through a European network of people who have run direct selling businesses themselves.

Who I am

Dirk Schiffner

Dirk Schiffner

Most European advice comes from people who have read the regulations. Mine comes from having run the organisations that live under them — twenty-plus years in direct selling and network marketing, in six countries and seven languages, with every rung of the ladder walked rather than read about. That is the difference between a memo that is technically correct and a plan that still works on a Tuesday evening in front of a room of hosts.

Dirk Schiffner on LinkedIn

Seven languages

  • German
  • English
  • French
  • Spanish
  • Italian
  • Russian
  • Finnish

Lived and worked in

United Kingdom · Switzerland · Germany · Spain · Czechia · Finland

Multicultural by default

Europe is not one market. Knowing where the seams run is most of the job.

Companies worked with

Partners

A bench, not a brochure

We work as a team of independent subject matter experts who genuinely master their own domain.

Independent specialists are assembled for the market and the problem: product registration and labelling, compensation plans, staffing, IT systems, leadership and local law.

Start with one call

Tell us the market, the product or category, the risk, and when you need to enter. You will get a straight answer on what the entry takes before anyone talks about a proposal.

Email

ds@dseurexperts.com

LinkedIn

Dirk Schiffner on LinkedIn

Based in

Switzerland — the centre of Europe. Working across the EU-27, UK and Africa.

Languages

EN · DE · FR · ES · IT · RU · FI

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