Do I have to disclose that my apparel brand is made in India when advertising to UK customers?

You don't have to volunteer it, but if your ad makes any origin claim — 'British brand', 'UK label' — the ASA's CAP Code Rule 3.7 says you need documentary evidence for it, and vague or false claims get upheld against you.

Does a .co.uk domain and GBP pricing mean I don't need to show my Indian business address?

No. CAP Code Rule 3.4.2 requires priced ads to disclose the marketer's name and geographical business address regardless of the domain or currency used.

Is Indian-made apparel still subject to UK import duty?

Mostly no — the UK-India trade deal eliminates tariffs on 99% of Indian goods, including apparel, though the exact HS code still matters because a separate scheme suspended preferential rates on some textile chapters from the start of 2026.

Should I hide that my product is manufactured in Tirupur to seem more 'British'?

I'd argue the opposite. Tirupur accounts for 55% of India's knitwear export volume and supplies Primark, Tesco, Next and M&S, so naming it is a provable claim — safer under CAP rules than an unproven 'British feel' positioning.

Advertising an Indian-Manufactured Apparel Brand to UK Customers

Advertising an Indian-manufactured apparel brand to UK customers isn't the same game as running the same ads domestically. Two things change the moment your factory is in Tirupur and your buyer is in Leeds: what you're legally allowed to say, and what the product actually costs to land.

Most founders only notice the first one when an ad gets flagged. The second one is quietly moving right now. The UK-India trade deal is phasing in zero duty on nearly all Indian goods, while a separate UK duty scheme just pulled preferential rates on some of those same textile categories.

Here's the answer up front: don't soften "Made in India" into something vague, fix your landed-cost math this week, and get your ad copy and landing page footer compliant with the ASA's CAP Code before you put another pound behind the campaign.

Key facts

CAP Code Rule 3.7 requires marketers to hold documentary evidence for any country-of-origin claim likely to be treated as objective. (ASA)
Rule 3.4.2 requires priced ads to disclose the marketer's name and geographical address, even on a .co.uk site priced in GBP. (ASA)
The UK-India trade deal eliminates tariffs on 99% of Indian goods, explicitly naming apparel and textiles. (GOV.UK)
CETA removes duties of up to 12% across 1,143 textile and apparel tariff lines between India and the UK. (Just Style)
Tirupur's knitwear exports hit a record ₹40,000 crore in FY2024-25, and the cluster supplies Primark, Tesco, Next and M&S. (Business Standard)

What changes when you advertise an Indian-made apparel brand to UK customers

Run the same Meta campaign you'd run for a Birmingham-based label, and two things are missing: proof of where the product is actually from, and proof of who you are as a business.

UK ad regulation treats country-of-origin and brand-location claims as "objective" claims, not vibes. The ASA's guidance on distance selling and location claims is explicit that these claims must not materially mislead and can't omit information a shopper would need to make a decision. "British brand" styling on a product made in Tirupur, with no disclosure, is exactly the kind of omission that gets flagged.

The second change is cost. Duty treatment on Indian apparel into the UK has moved twice in the past year, in opposite directions depending on the product's HS code. If you haven't recalculated your landed cost recently, your target CPA is probably wrong.

The compliance rule most brands get wrong

Founders who've read the headlines about the UK-India deal assume duty-free also means claim-free. It doesn't. Two separate CAP Code rules apply regardless of tariffs.

Rule 3.7 says if you make a country-of-origin claim — "Made in India", "British label", "Designed in London, made in Tirupur" — you need to be able to produce evidence for it on request. That's mill certificates, supplier invoices, or your own customs paperwork. Not a general sense that it's true.

Rule 3.4.2 is the one most Indian D2C brands selling into the UK actually breach without knowing it: priced ads must disclose the marketer's legal name and geographical business address, even if the storefront is a .co.uk domain and every price is in pounds. The ASA's Rule(s) Britannia write-up covers exactly this pattern — brands that look British by domain and currency but are run from elsewhere, and get pulled up for it.

Fixing this is unglamorous and takes an afternoon: add your registered company name and address to the site footer and the checkout page, and don't make an origin claim in ad copy you can't back with a document.

Your landed cost just moved twice

This isn't an ad-platform setting, but it changes what a profitable CPA even looks like.

The UK-India trade deal eliminates tariffs on 99% of Indian goods, and the UK government's own summary names apparel and textiles as direct beneficiaries. Separately, Just Style reports CETA removes duties of up to 12% across 1,143 specific tariff lines covering textiles and apparel. For a lot of SKUs, that's a real cost advantage, not just a marketing line.

But the deal phases in over years, and it's not the only duty mechanism in play. Ligentia's analysis confirms the UK suspended preferential rates under its separate Developing Countries Trading Scheme on Indian textile/apparel HS chapters 50-58 and 62-63 from 1 January 2026 — some of the exact same product categories CETA is meant to help.

Net effect: the same hoodie, classified under two slightly different HS codes, can be getting cheaper under one scheme and more expensive under the other. Before you scale a campaign, get your customs broker or freight forwarder to confirm which schedule your actual SKUs sit under, then rebuild your landed-cost sheet and target CPA from there. Don't inherit a CPA target you set a year ago.

The contrarian move: name Tirupur, don't hide it

Most agencies default to softening the origin story — vague "designed for the UK" copy, British-sounding brand names, no mention of the factory. I think that's backwards, and it's riskier under the rules above, not safer.

Tirupur isn't an obscure claim you need to dress up. Its knitwear exports hit a record ₹40,000 crore in FY2024-25, up from roughly ₹33,000 crore the prior year, and it accounts for 55% of India's total knitwear export volume, supplying brands including Primark, Tesco, Next and M&S, according to Business Standard's reporting. That's a specific, documented, checkable claim.

My read: under Rule 3.7, a specific claim you can evidence — "knitted in Tirupur, the cluster that supplies M&S and Primark" — is more defensible than an unqualified "British brand" feel that implies something you can't prove. The Rule(s) Britannia cases the ASA writes about are almost always vague-claim cases, not specific-origin ones. Specificity is the compliance strategy here, not the risk.

It's also better creative. "Same mills, no middleman markup" is a sharper hook than invented British heritage a UK shopper will see through on the second scroll anyway.

What I'd do Monday

Pull your current landed-cost sheet and get your HS codes re-checked by your customs broker against both the CETA phase-in schedule and the DCTS suspension on chapters 50-58 and 62-63.
Add your legal company name and registered address to the site footer and checkout page, to satisfy CAP Code Rule 3.4.2.
Collect documentary evidence — mill certificates, supplier invoices, certificates of origin — for any "Made in India" or "Tirupur" claim you plan to run, per Rule 3.7.
Write one ad variant that names Tirupur explicitly and one that stays vague, and run them against each other before committing budget either way.
Recompute your target CPA using the corrected landed cost before you raise daily spend, not after. If you want a second pair of eyes on where the spend is leaking before you touch anything, the free 10-minute ad-account audit is a reasonable place to start.

Where this touches my work

Most of what I'm describing here — origin claims, landed cost, target CPA — showed up in practice on the Nova Attire account, a manufacturing-to-D2C apparel brand where the ad funnel had to carry both an Indian supply chain and a price-sensitive overseas buyer. It's a narrower problem than most agencies make it sound.