Exporting perfume from Dubai: what to ask before you order

Because the export routes meet here. A city that sits between Europe, Asia and Africa ends up handling other people’s goods as a matter of geography, and perfume in particular travels well: small, valuable, and wanted almost everywhere at once.

The second reason is less often said. Perfume is a trade where the buyer needs to be able to ask a question and get an answer from someone who will still be there next season. Dubai kept that kind of trading alive when a lot of places replaced it with a form.

Someone asking about Saudi Arabia is asking a different question from someone asking about Kuwait, and both are asking something different again from a buyer in Iraq or further out. The rules differ, the paperwork differs, and what your own customs broker will want from you differs. Anyone who answers all of them with one sentence is not answering.

So we answer them one at a time, in the conversation, once we know which one you are actually asking. Tell us the destination in your first message — it is the single detail that changes the most.

A perfume export shipment usually travels with a commercial invoice and a packing list, and depending on where it is going it may need a document attesting origin. Alcohol content matters to carriers, so how a consignment is packed and declared is part of the conversation rather than an afterthought.

What exactly your side needs is set by your destination and by your own broker or freight agent, not by us — and we would rather say that plainly than publish a checklist that turns out to be wrong for your country. Bring what they told you, and we will work to it.

A company that can answer the second message in the buyer’s own language wins the second message. That is most of what a long-distance trade relationship is: not the first order, but whether the follow-up was tiring.

This site is published in five languages for the same reason. Search in yours, then ask in yours.