About CIG
An international regulatory partner built for modern beauty brands.
CIG handles cross-border cosmetic compliance at a fixed price and a fast turnaround, so independent brands can sell in more markets without building a regulatory team.
Why CIG exists
Modern brands move faster than the old model of compliance.
Independent, online-first brands now formulate quickly, sell direct to customers and cross borders earlier than previous generations of beauty brands did. The moment a product ships to the EU, UK, Switzerland or the US, it takes on a set of legal obligations: a named Responsible Person, a compliant Product Information File, a signed safety assessment and the right notification in each market.
Those obligations are size-blind. A hobbyist selling a few bars of soap faces the same mandatory CPSR, PIF and Responsible Person requirement in the EU as a multinational, with no small-business exemption and no turnover threshold. The vocabulary alone (Responsible Person, authorised representative, PIF, CPSR, CPNP) reads as enterprise legalese, and many solo makers assume the rules were never written for them. They were.
The result is a familiar pattern. A brand that finally solves the EU learns the UK is a separate regime with its own Responsible Person and its own OPSS notification, and that the US now has MoCRA on top. Each market roughly repeats the workload. Some small sellers respond by geo-blocking Europe or dropping export markets entirely rather than face the paperwork and the cost.
Traditional regulatory consultancies were built for large companies with a handful of products and a budget to match. They bill by the hour, which makes them slow and expensive for a brand with thirty products and a launch deadline. CIG is built for those brands, with fixed prices, fast turnaround and one partner covering four markets.
What we do
The coverage of a regulatory department, without building one.
We act as your Responsible Person in the EU and UK, your responsible agent in Switzerland and your US Agent under MoCRA.
We produce the safety dossiers, Product Information Files and notifications you need, and we keep them current as the rules change. You get the coverage of a full regulatory department without hiring one.
A non-EU brand cannot be its own EU Responsible Person, and only a Responsible Person legally established in the Union can access the CPNP portal to notify a product. The same holds in the UK, where the Responsible Person must have a genuine UK-established address (a PO box or mail-forwarding address does not qualify) and files through SCPN at the OPSS. Switzerland requires a responsible person or agent with an address on Swiss territory, because the compliance obligation cannot be delegated to anyone located abroad. Under MoCRA, a foreign facility that must register also needs a US Agent who is physically present in the United States. CIG holds each of these roles so you do not have to establish an entity in every market.
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Four markets, one partner
One relationship for every market your brand enters.
Every market is a separate legal regime with its own paperwork and its own Responsible Person rules. CIG covers all four from a single relationship, so nothing falls between them.
These four markets are not one market with four flavours. Each has its own law, its own portal, and its own definition of who is legally responsible for the product. A notification in one does nothing for the others. The EU CPNP and the UK SCPN are entirely separate systems that do not talk to each other, so uploading to the EU portal does not cover Great Britain. An EU Responsible Person does not cover Switzerland, and a Swiss address on the packaging does not transfer the legal obligation to it. Northern Ireland is treated separately again: under the Windsor Framework the NI market follows EU Regulation 1223/2009 and the EU route rather than the Great Britain route.
Why one partner
What a single international model does for your brand.
Most compliance providers cover one jurisdiction well and bundle the rest poorly. That leaves brands stitching together several vendors, one per market, each with its own contract, contact and portal login.
Switching to CIG
Changing your Responsible Person, without a gap in coverage.
A common worry is being locked in to a provider. You are not. A Responsible Person can be changed after your products are already on the market.
A new Responsible Person can take over your existing CPNP and SCPN accounts and manage future updates from there, so your notifications stay live through the change. We review the documents you already hold, confirm what is current, and update the Responsible Person name and address where it appears (on the CPNP or SCPN record, and on the product label at the next print run). The aim is a clean handover with your products continuously covered.
See how switching works →How we are different
Built around the things brands actually need.
Straight answers
What we are careful to be honest about.
Some claims in this market are easy to make and hard to keep. We would rather set expectations plainly.
Listing a product with the FDA does not mean it is FDA approved. The FDA does not approve cosmetic products before they reach the market, and no compliance provider can obtain an approval that does not exist. What MoCRA requires is facility registration and product listing, plus safety substantiation kept on file, and that is what we deliver.
Compliance does not remove the cost of testing. The safety assessment relies on lab work such as stability, challenge and microbiological testing, and for some claims on substantiation studies. Those costs and timelines sit with the testing itself. What we can do is price our own work up front and run the paperwork around the testing without adding delay.
A small business is not automatically exempt from everything. The MoCRA small-business exemption reduces the registration and listing burden for firms under the sales threshold, but adverse-event reporting, labelling and safety substantiation still apply, and the exemption is lost entirely if a product falls into a higher-risk category such as one that regularly contacts the mucous membrane of the eye. In the EU and UK there is no small-business exemption from the Responsible Person requirement at all.
Our team
The people behind CIG.
CIG is led by Shervin Yavari, founder of SBR Group Sàrl, a cosmetics company in Switzerland. Our regulatory work is delivered by experienced associates and reviewed by qualified safety assessors, including Cassandra Maddocks, a Sweden-based chemist and biochemist with over ten years of experience formulating cosmetics. How we research, verify and review what we publish is set out in our methodology and our editorial standards.
Common questions
Questions brands ask before they start.
Plain answers to the questions we hear most often about who CIG is and how the four markets work.
In practice
Compliance, in the real world.
