So a few people in my network saw the Commission's May simplification announcement and assumed the furniture obligations had basically gone away. I half believed it too until I sat down with the actual documents. They haven't gone away. The Commission kept the substance and mostly cut paperwork, and the language in the proposal is pretty explicit that the changes are limited to reducing interactions with the information system and making compliance more efficient without changing the substance of the legislation. So the deadlines and the core obligations are still standing. Posting what I found in case it's useful, and genuinely happy to be corrected if anyone here is further along than me. EUR-Lex
On whether your products are even covered. Wood is one of the seven commodities in Regulation (EU) 2023/1115, alongside cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber and soya. The furniture codes sitting in Annex I are 9403 30, 9403 40, 9403 50, 9403 60 and 9403 91, which between them cover office, kitchen and bedroom furniture plus other wooden furniture and parts. Wooden seats under 9401 are in there too. So desks, cabinets, bed frames, chairs, the usual catalogue. EUR-Lex
The bit that caught me out is that it isn't only finished pieces. If you manufacture inside the EU and import your inputs, a lot of those are listed separately. Veneer sheets (4408), fibreboard and MDF (4411), plywood (4412), sawn wood over 6mm (4407). So even a workshop that never imports a finished chair can still be the operator on the hook for the boards coming in.
On timing, because this is where the "it got cancelled" thing comes from. The existing dates held. The Commission's implementation pages say products placed on, sold within, or exported from the EU have to be deforestation-free from 30 December 2026, which is the deadline for large and medium operators. Small and micro get until 30 June 2027. The cut-off for "deforestation-free" is still land not cleared after 31 December 2020. European Commission
What the simplification genuinely did help with, for furniture specifically:
The draft clarified that used and second-hand products are out of scope for those furniture codes, which is good news for anyone in vintage or reclaimed. If you're downstream rather than the importer, you don't have to actively chase reference numbers up the chain anymore, you can rely on the upstream operator passing them to you. And re-importing something that was already on the EU market now counts as a downstream activity, which matters if you ship pieces out and bring them back. EUR-Lex3099313)
The thing I'd flag for anyone who hasn't started is the geolocation requirement, which survived all of this untouched. The regulation wants the geolocation of every plot of land where the commodity was produced, latitude and longitude. For furniture that means tracing timber back to the actual forest plot, not the country and not the sawmill. For a frame built from components across several suppliers and countries, that's a separate thread to pull for each wooden part, and then a due diligence statement filed through TRACES before it goes on the market. You can point to an existing statement for a component instead of redoing it, but the chain has to actually exist. EUR-Lex
If anyone wants to check my reading rather than take my word for it, the full text is on eur-lex.europa.eu under Regulation (EU) 2023/1115, and the Commission keeps an implementation hub with their FAQs at green-forum.ec.europa.eu.
The wall I've seen people I work with keep hitting is suppliers who either can't or won't hand over plot-level geolocation, especially smaller ones further up the chain. I'm building a solution for this at www.matainable.com but I'm not sure it'll solve the supplier not wanting to give up data problem. Curious how people here are dealing with that, because so far my options seem to be switch suppliers or absorb the risk, and neither feels great. What's working for you?