Should a Polish Brand Sell in Türkiye? Usually Not — and Here Is Who It Works For

For most Polish consumer brands the answer is no, and the reason is not the one you are expecting. It is not customs duty. The EU–Türkiye customs union runs both ways: your industrial and processed agricultural goods enter Türkiye duty-free on the same basis Turkish goods enter Poland.

The barrier is the price in lira. And that means the honest answer is segmented rather than negative — which is the whole point of this post.

What the market actually is

85 million people, young, urban and unusually digital: high smartphone penetration, heavy social commerce, a population that adopts fast. Every article about Türkiye stops here, and that is why every article about Türkiye is useless. A large young digital market is a reason to look. It is not a reason to ship.

Why euro-priced consumer goods struggle

A product priced in euro and sold in lira competes against local wages, not against local competitors' euro costs. Sustained lira depreciation has repriced everything imported relative to domestic purchasing power, which compresses exactly the middle of the market where most Polish consumer brands sit: too expensive to be mainstream, not premium enough to be aspirational.

You can win at the top of the market, where price is a signal rather than a constraint, and you can win where there is no local substitute. In the middle you are selling a more expensive version of something that already exists.

Who it does work for

Three groups, consistently:

• Industrial inputs and components. The buyer prices in hard currency, specifies on performance, and the customs union means no duty. This is the strongest case on the list and the least written about.
• Machinery and equipment. Bought on total cost of ownership and service availability, not on sticker price. Polish machine builders are competitive here and the region beyond Türkiye is reachable from it.
• Food ingredients and processing inputs. B2B, specification-driven — but check the agricultural position carefully, because unprocessed agriculture is outside the customs union and runs on a separate regime.

What these three share is a buyer who is not a consumer. Currency risk sits differently for a business buying an input it will convert and sell on than for a household buying a finished good.

If you are going anyway

1. Price in lira and hold the price. A brand that reprices monthly is a brand nobody plans around. Build the FX cost into your margin rather than passing it through.
2. Sell through someone local. A distributor or agent is not a shortcut here, it is the market-entry mechanism. Relationships carry more commercial weight than they do in Poland.
3. Expect to be asked for credit terms, and decide your position before the first meeting rather than during it.
4. Get the customs position in writing for your specific goods — industrial versus agricultural changes the answer entirely.

What we would say in the room

If you sell an industrial input, Türkiye is a serious market and the duty position is a genuine advantage. If you sell a mid-market consumer product, we would rather tell you now that this is hard than take a fee to find out slowly. That is not modesty — a market entry that fails costs you a year and costs us a reference.

What we can help with: assessing the fit honestly, finding and vetting the distributor, and the Turkish-language commercial layer. See Enter Türkiye and business development.

What we have and have not done: every case study we own runs the other way — Turkish brands entering Poland. In this direction we have the expertise and an office in İzmir, and no client story to point at yet. We would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Tell us what you sell and we will give you the segmented answer rather than the encouraging one.

Figures checked September 2026.