Small sustainable brands built outside the United States often reach a point where American demand is too large to ignore: refill-station suppliers, makers of plastic-free household goods, upcycled textile labels, natural cosmetics studios. Selling into the US usually means two pieces of groundwork. One is a company structure that US marketplaces, payment processors and retail buyers are comfortable with. The other, which catches far more brands out, is the rulebook for environmental marketing claims: the FTC Green Guides.
This piece covers both, starting with the one that can cost a brand its reputation.
What the FTC Green Guides are
The Green Guides are the Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on environmental marketing, published as 16 CFR Part 260, “Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims”. They set out how the FTC applies Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts and practices, to environmental claims. The guides themselves note that they do not bind the FTC or the public, but the Commission can take action under the FTC Act when a marketer makes a claim inconsistent with them.
For a brand arriving from abroad, the key point is that the guides apply to how a claim reads to a US consumer, whatever the rules are at home. A phrase that passes unremarked in one market can be a problem in the American one.
The claims the guides address
The guides work through specific categories of claims, each with its own section. The ones that matter most to consumer-product brands are:
- General environmental benefit claims, such as “eco-friendly” or “green”. The guides say marketers should not make these claims unqualified, and should instead limit them with clear, prominent language to the specific benefit being asserted.
- Recyclable claims. An unqualified “recyclable” claim is appropriate only when recycling facilities are available to a substantial majority of the consumers or communities where the item is sold, which the guides define as at least 60 percent. Below that, the claim needs qualification. Technical recyclability somewhere in the world is not the test.
- Compostable and degradable claims, which turn on how and where the item actually breaks down, and in what time frame.
- Recycled content claims, which need to be accurate about the proportion and the source of the recycled material.
- Carbon offset claims. A seller should disclose when an offset represents emission reductions that will not occur for two years or longer, and it is deceptive to present as an offset a reduction that was already required by law.
- Certifications and seals. Using a certifier’s name, logo or seal may be an endorsement subject to the FTC’s Endorsement Guides, and third-party certification does not remove the marketer’s own duty to back up the claims it implies.
- Refillable, free-of, non-toxic and renewable claims, each covered by its own section of Part 260.
A practical discipline follows from this. Before a product listing goes live in the US, each environmental word on the packaging and product page should be traced to evidence that supports what an ordinary shopper would take it to mean. The brands that avoid trouble tend to be specific: “made with 70 percent post-consumer recycled plastic” with records to show it, rather than “eco packaging”.
The company side of selling into the US
The second piece of groundwork is structural. Many overseas brands sell to American customers through a US limited liability company, because US marketplaces, payment processors and retail buyers are set up around US entities. US law does not require the owner of an LLC to be a US citizen or resident, and the whole process can be completed remotely.
The sequence is administrative rather than difficult. The company is formed in a chosen state, with a registered agent there to receive official mail. It needs a US business address and an Employer Identification Number, which owners without a Social Security Number obtain through the IRS’s phone, fax or mail route rather than online. Formation services such as CORPBOLT handle this layer for founders based outside the United States.
Two cautions keep the structure honest. A US company does not change where the brand’s profits are ultimately taxed; the owner’s home-country rules still apply, and that is a conversation for a cross-border tax adviser. And a foreign-owned single-member LLC has an annual information filing with the IRS, Form 5472 attached to a pro forma Form 1120, which belongs on the calendar from the day the company is formed.
Why the two belong together
It is tempting to treat company formation as the serious step and marketing copy as the easy one. For sustainable brands, the order of risk is often the reverse. A company can be formed correctly in a few weeks. A careless claim on thousands of product pages is harder to unwind, and it lands on the very credibility a sustainable brand exists to protect.
The brands that enter the US market well tend to do both pieces of groundwork together: a clean company structure behind the sales, and a claims review that treats every green word as a promise with evidence behind it. That is good compliance. It is also, for a sustainable brand, simply the brand.
