What is the GARAN label?

GARAN is the EU's harmonised label for a commercial guarantee of durability — a producer's promise that a product keeps working as expected for a set number of years. It is voluntary, unlike the legal guarantee notice, and it is reserved for guarantees offered at no additional cost that cover the entire good for longer than two years.

Is the GARAN label mandatory?

No. The harmonised legal guarantee notice becomes mandatory for EU B2C sales of physical goods on 27 September 2026. GARAN is voluntary and only applies where a qualifying producer durability guarantee exists. Most products in a typical Shopify catalogue will never carry it.

Why must a GARAN guarantee run longer than two years?

The EU legal guarantee of conformity already gives consumers a two-year floor. A durability guarantee of two years or less adds nothing beyond what the law already provides, so labelling it as an extra guarantee would mislead. Durations must exceed two years to qualify.

Which fields on the GARAN label can I edit?

Three, and all three must be edited. The Commission's practical guidelines list them as the letters XX (replaced by the guarantee duration in years), the words Brand/Trademark (replaced by the producer's name), and the words Model identifier (replaced by the model identifier). Everything else — the GARAN wordmark, the tick symbol, the QR code, the colours, the multilingual caption — is fixed and must not be altered. Durations use a comma decimal: 2,5 rather than 2.5, and only half-year steps are permitted.

Can a retailer offer a GARAN guarantee themselves?

GARAN represents a commercial guarantee of durability offered by the producer. A retailer's own extended warranty, a paid protection plan, or a third-party insurance product is a different thing and does not belong under this label.

Which products qualify for the GARAN label?

Quick Answer

Short answer: GARAN requires a producer durability guarantee that is free of charge, covers the whole product, and runs longer than two years. It's voluntary, and most products in a normal catalogue won't qualify. The label carries exactly three editable fields, and leaving any of them as the template's placeholder text is its own kind of non-compliance.

Two things arrive together on 27 September 2026 and get conflated constantly. The harmonised legal guarantee notice is mandatory for EU B2C sales of physical goods. The GARAN label is voluntary and narrow. Confusing them produces a storefront covered in labels that shouldn't be there.

This guide is about the second one, and specifically about the eligibility test — the part that determines whether you may display it at all.

The four conditions

A durability guarantee qualifies for GARAN when all four hold:

Two years exactly does not qualify

It has to exceed two years. A flat 24-month producer guarantee is the same duration as the statutory floor and is not a GARAN case. We block it in our own validation for exactly this reason.

Durations aren't always whole years

A detail worth knowing if you're building or configuring this: producer guarantees are not always expressed in whole years. Two-and-a-half, three, five-and-a-half all occur in the wild — particularly in furniture, appliances, and tooling.

Rejecting half-years makes genuinely lawful guarantees unshowable, which is a real bug rather than a conservative choice. Half-year steps should be accepted; anything finer is almost certainly a data-entry error, and anything past about fifty years is someone typing months into a years field.

The three editable fields — and why leaving one is a bug

The official GARAN template ships with placeholder text in three places, and the Commission's practical guidelines (section 3.1.4) are explicit that all three are editable fields which "must be edited by the producer":

Placeholder in the template	Replace with
`XX`	The guarantee duration in years
`Brand/Trademark`	The producer's name
`Model identifier`	The model identifier

Their stated purpose is to "connect the EU GARAN label directly and unambiguously to the product model it refers to" — which is exactly why leaving them unedited defeats the point. A label reading "Brand/Trademark" beside a washing machine tells a consumer nothing about whose guarantee it is.

Everything else is fixed: the GARAN wordmark, the tick symbol, the QR code, the colours, the typography, and the "producer guarantee in years" caption in all official EU languages. Those must not be altered, and the guidance is blunt about it — "Change only the editable fields."

Durations use a comma, and only half years

2,5 — not 2.5. The guidelines state the decimal must be preceded by a comma, and that no decimal other than ,5 is permitted: 4,1 and 4,2 are explicitly disallowed. Whole numbers including two digits (11, 12) are fine.

Never render a label from client-supplied values

If your GARAN image is generated from query parameters, anyone can forge a label for any product on your storefront by editing a URL. Generate server-side from the product's own stored data, and ignore anything the request tries to tell you about duration, brand, or model.

That last point isn't theoretical fussiness. A GARAN label is a claim about a legal guarantee. A forgeable one is a liability sitting on your own domain.

What usually qualifies, and what usually doesn't

Often qualifies: appliances and electronics with genuine manufacturer durability programmes; quality furniture with 5- or 10-year whole-product guarantees; tools and outdoor equipment from brands that compete on longevity.

Usually doesn't: consumables and perishables; clothing and textiles outside a few technical-outerwear brands; anything where the "guarantee" is a paid add-on; anything where coverage is limited to one component; own-brand goods with no articulated producer durability promise; and — the big one — products where the guarantee is exactly two years.

If you're a reseller, the honest starting assumption is that most of your catalogue doesn't qualify, and the ones that do are the lines where the producer already advertises a long guarantee loudly, because it's a selling point they've invested in.

Getting the underlying data is the actual work

The eligibility test is easy to state and tedious to apply, because the input isn't in your Shopify data. Nothing in a product record tells you whether the producer offers a free whole-product durability guarantee longer than two years. That lives in supplier documentation, brand websites, and distribution agreements.

Practical order of attack:

Start with the brands that already market long guarantees — they've done the work for you.
Ask suppliers directly for the ones you're unsure about; get it in writing, because you're going to be making a public claim.
Confirm per product, not per brand. Producers routinely run different guarantee terms across their own ranges.
Leave everything else alone. An unlabelled qualifying product is a missed marketing opportunity; a labelled non-qualifying one is a compliance problem.

How we handle it

Our app validates the duration rule before a label can render — over two years, half-year steps, sane upper bound — and requires brand and model to be present. Confirmation is per product, deliberately, because per-brand defaults would produce exactly the false positives described above.

Labels render server-side from the product's own stored data through an app proxy that never trusts query values, so a label can't be forged by editing a URL. All three editable fields are substituted, and the renderer refuses to emit a label at all if brand or model is missing rather than shipping one that still reads "Brand/Trademark". The official artwork is held under integrity hashes verified in CI against the Commission's published vectors.

Frequently asked questions

Related: which products need the mandatory notice — a much broader set than GARAN — and what happens if you miss 27 September.

This guide is written by the team behind an EU guarantee compliance app for Shopify. It's a practical implementation guide, not legal advice — for a definitive read on your obligations, talk to a lawyer in your market.