We're Spending Two Days in a Classroom Before We Can Fly a Single Bottle of Perfume
Perfume is a flammable liquid, so flying it is a licensed activity. On 17–18 August our founder sits a two-day dangerous goods course. Here is what it took to book it.
On 17 and 18 August, our founder sits in a room in Warsaw for two eight-hour days, learning how to legally hand a box of perfume to an airline.
Not how to pack it. How to be a person who is allowed to send it. In most countries that is a licensed activity with a named human being attached to it, and we did not fully understand that until we tried to book the course.
This is the third part of a story we started in why shipping perfume is harder than it looks and continued in our first cross-border shipping test. Here is what actually happened.
Why perfume is a dangerous good
Perfume is mostly alcohol. Alcohol burns. That is the entire reason for everything below.
In the international system for transporting hazardous materials, perfume containing flammable solvent travels under UN 1266, "Perfumery products", in Class 3 — flammable liquids. The UN number is not a warning about your skin; it is an instruction to everyone who handles the box about what to do if it is crushed, punctured, or caught in a fire.
Every mode of transport has its own rulebook. For air, the operational standard is the IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations (DGR), which IATA itself describes as "the global reference for shipping dangerous goods by air and the only standard recognized by airlines". The current version is the 67th edition, in force since 1 January 2026.
And the DGR does not only regulate the box. It regulates the people. Dangerous goods training has moved to a competency-based training and assessment (CBTA) model, meaning training is built around what a specific person actually does rather than a generic syllabus. The function that covers our work — classifying, packing, marking, labelling and signing off consignments — is the one a shipper needs before an airline will accept anything from them.
The part that surprised us: the shipper is a person, not a company
Here is where it stopped being an abstraction.
Poland regulates this through the Act of 5 August 2022 on the carriage of dangerous goods by air (Dz.U. 2022 poz. 1715). Reading the statute itself rather than a summary of it changed our plan, because of what Article 16 requires. The shipper is defined as the natural person who signs the transport documents — not the legal entity. That person must have passed appropriate dangerous goods training, and must appear on the Civil Aviation Authority's public list of shippers.
We have no employees. So "the company gets certified" was never an option available to us. The person who packs the box and signs the declaration is our founder, and therefore the training and the registration attach to him personally.
The rest of the statute is refreshingly specific, and we now have the dates in a calendar:
| Requirement | Where it says so | |---|---| | Apply to the authority within 7 days of receiving the certificate | Art. 17(1) | | Authority registers within 14 days of a complete application | Art. 18(4) | | Certificate valid 24 months, counted from the end of the month you completed it | Art. 21(2) | | Only refresher training may be taken electronically — the first course must be in person | Art. 28 | | Registration fee: 350 zł | Art. 42(4) |
That last line is a small example of why we read primary sources. One training provider's website quoted the fee as 300 zł. The statute says 350. It is a trivial sum, but a wrong number on a payment confirmation is exactly the kind of thing that sends an application back to the start of a 14-day clock.
We also had to unlearn something. A carrier told us early on that we needed "IATA DGR 1.5". Section 1.5 is not a qualification — it is the chapter of the regulations where the training requirements live. Chasing a certificate with that name would have wasted weeks.
Booking the course was harder than passing it will be
We assumed the training would be the easy administrative step. It took a month, and two providers turned us down.
The first said no because of us. We asked for a course for one person, on specific dates, in a specific place. The reply was direct: given those constraints and the low number of participants — one — they could not take the job. That is not unreasonable. It is also a permanent feature of our situation. We will always be one person. Any provider whose model depends on filling a room will keep saying no to us for the same reason.
The second said no because of language. They confirmed, in three lines, that they deliver training only in Polish and only in person, and so could not offer a course meeting our conditions. Our founder's Polish is not good enough to sit a technical exam in it, and getting a dangerous goods classification subtly wrong because of a vocabulary gap is not a risk worth taking.
Two rejections, two completely different reasons, and one useful lesson: our two structural constraints are one participant and English delivery. We now lead with the language question in the first line of any enquiry, because there is no point discussing price with someone who cannot teach us at all.
The third said yes, and improved on what we asked for. A dedicated two-day course instead of a three-day group one. Delivered in English. The regulations manual provided for the duration rather than bought separately. The certificate issued on the day, which matters a great deal when the law gives you seven days to file. Invoiced afterwards rather than prepaid.
Before agreeing, we did one more check that we would recommend to anyone in this position: we pulled the Civil Aviation Authority's published list of approved instructors and confirmed our instructor was actually on it, with a registration number and an expiry date that covers our course dates. A certificate from an instructor outside that list would not satisfy the statute. The training would be real, the paperwork would be worthless.
Then we spent a day booking a room, because the trainer comes to you and we do not have a meeting room of our own. Two consecutive days, 9:00 to 17:00, with a projector that takes an HDMI input. That last detail is not a footnote — turning up to a two-day technical course and discovering the instructor cannot display anything is a very expensive way to learn about cables.
What we still don't have
We would rather tell you this than have it surface later.
The trainer asked for the safety data sheet of the product we intend to ship. We have one for the concentrate we buy. We do not yet have one for the finished, diluted product in its bottle — the thing that actually goes in the box — and the person who can produce it is away until the end of the month.
We do not think this blocks the training itself; classification rules can be taught on the correct documents once they exist. But it does mean we will finish the course holding a qualification and still owing ourselves a document. We are treating that as an open item rather than a solved one.
The same honesty applies to routes. Until the certificate is issued and the registration is on the public list, there are destinations we cannot fly to at all. That is the current state, and it is the reason this course is not being scheduled around anything else.
What happens next
- 17–18 August — two days, eight hours each, exam at the end.
- The same day — certificate issued.
- Within 7 days — application to the Civil Aviation Authority, with proof of the 350 zł fee.
- Within 14 days of that — entry on the public list of shippers.
- Then — carrier approval, which is a separate process with its own paperwork. Being on the state's list does not automatically make a carrier accept your boxes.
Realistically, that puts us at a working air lane in September rather than August. We would have preferred to discover the "one participant, in English" problem in June. But we would much rather find it now than find it on the day a customer is waiting.
If you want the earlier chapters, why shipping perfume is harder than it looks explains the regulations from the outside, and our first cross-border shipping test is what happened when we put a real box on a real road.
We write these updates as things happen, including the parts that make us look slow. Our newsletter, The Hidden Nose, goes out once a week.
The next bottle has not been announced.
The list is the only way we will tell you.