NIVEA — Wholesale Supply

Depth, not breadth: this is not a counter brand

The commonest mistake on a first NIVEA enquiry is buying it the way a pharmacy range is bought. The volume here sits with hypermarkets and supermarkets, with cash-and-carry, with discounters, with open wholesale markets, and with the regional distributors who feed independent grocery. Those buyers take a small number of references and put real depth behind each one. They do not need the range to look complete, they need the fast lines never to be absent, and a shelf that carries eight slow references and runs out of the two that sell has failed in a way a counter assortment would not.

So a sensible opening order is short and deep. Deodorants and body formats usually carry the volume in most markets. The tin is the reference a buyer names first and rarely the one that pays for the container. Men's grooming is a slower build, and a modest opening commitment is the sensible way to take it. Face care, sun and lip care are decided by what your fixture already does rather than by what the range contains. If your business also serves a counter, the pharmacy-facing half of the same manufacturer's portfolio is quoted from the same warehouse and the same document set — buyers running both usually price Eucerin on the same booking, which puts two entirely different channels behind one clearance.

Aerosols change the paperwork before they change the price

Spray deodorants are pressurised packagings, and that makes them dangerous goods in transport terms rather than ordinary cosmetics. They travel under the aerosols entry, UN 1950, which brings a dangerous goods declaration, marking of the packages, segregation and stowage decisions taken by the carrier, and in some cases limited-quantity provisions. Airfreight treats them more restrictively again. None of that makes a load difficult; it makes it a different load, planned earlier.

What matters commercially is that you say at enquiry stage whether sprays are in the mix. A container built on roll-ons, sticks, lotions, creams and tins is documented one way, and the same container with a few aerosol pallets in it is documented another. Finding that out after a booking is how a departure slips. Tell us the split and the declaration is prepared with the offer rather than retrofitted to it.

Which market's stock, and the over-label question

On a dermatological line the buyer's anxiety is counterfeiting. On a mass brand it is usually provenance: not whether the goods are genuine but which market's version they are and whether that version satisfies the destination. Those are different worries and they take different answers.

What we hold comes out of legitimate European supply channels and stays in the manufacturer's own sealed packaging. It is never re-boxed, stripped or relabelled by us. What is printed on that packaging — the ingredient declaration in INCI, the responsible person's details, the languages, the batch coding and the period-after-opening marking — is fixed at manufacture and is exactly what an authority at destination reads. Before you commit we say which market's version you are being offered and what is printed on it, so the assessment rests on facts rather than on assumptions. Where a destination permits local-language stickering, the sticker is normally assessed as part of the label, which makes it a question to raise at quotation and not after loading. Registration or notification of cosmetics at destination, where required, sits with the importer of record; we supply the goods and the file that travels with them and we do not claim to clear your market for you. Our documentation and loading practice sets out what that file contains.

How the load is actually built

Three shapes cover almost every order and each does a different job.

1. Single-reference pallets. Cleanest to receive, count and resell. They suit a distributor feeding a depot with a line it already turns, and they reduce picking errors at the far end.
2. Mixed-reference pallets. Coverage across several lines without committing full pallets to formats that may not land. The right tool for opening a market or reading an assortment.
3. The mixed container. Sub-ranges, and usually other brands too, under a single booking, which spreads the transport bill across a larger invoice.

The mix drives the quotation as much as the quantity does. Lip care by the container and body lotion by the container are not the same trade at all, and how cube stands against weight in whatever you pick changes the stow as well as the figure that can be held. Case counts per layer, layers per pallet and pallets per twenty- or forty-foot unit are stated on the pro-forma against the allocation offered rather than published as fixed figures, because they move with pack format and production run. If the load planning itself is the open question, how a container is filled in practice covers the arithmetic before you commit to a quantity.

Finishing a container that personal care has not filled

Personal care is light for its cube. Once the beauty pallets are placed there is usually payload left, and it is worth planning for rather than paying for. Buyers routinely complete a load from an adjacent shelf — family care, household lines, ambient grocery — on the same booking, so one clearance and one freight cost serve two or three categories. Mixed-brand pallets are standard here rather than a favour, and they are labelled pallet by pallet, so nothing has to be counted twice at the far end.

Terms, gateways and what we do not claim

Loading is from Madrid, inland. EXW means our premises, not a port, which is the single most frequent misunderstanding in a first negotiation; FOB, CFR, CIF and DAP are all available, and DDP is not part of the standard offer. Valencia lies roughly 355 km away and Barcelona roughly 620 km, each about a day's haul, with Algeciras as the transhipment alternative and Coslada as the rail option. Exports go worldwide.

Consignments carry the commercial invoice, packing list, export declaration, transport document and Certificate of Origin, with a EUR.1 movement certificate where a preferential agreement applies and the goods qualify on manufacture. And the point that should be read as legal rather than modest: Iguazu Trading holds no appointment, distributorship or exclusivity from any brand owner. We are an independent distributor of genuine EU-sourced stock, and every claim on this page is one you can test on the documents.