Save handmade toys

Has anyone heard of this? Anyone dealing with compliance?

http://www.handmadetoyalliance.org/

In 2007, large toy manufacturers who outsource their production to China and other developing countries violated the public’s trust. They were selling toys with dangerously high lead content, toys with unsafe small part, toys with improperly secured and easily swallowed small magnets, and toys made from chemicals that made kids sick. Almost every problem toy in 2007 was made in China.

The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.

All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.
For small toymakers and manufacturers of children’s products, however, the costs of mandatory testing will likely drive them out of business.

  • A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $300 - $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.
  • A work at home mom in Minnesota who makes cloth diapers to sell online must choose either to violate the law or cease operations.
  • A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.
  • And even the handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.


    The CPSIA simply forgot to exclude the class of children’s goods that have earned and kept the public’s trust: Toys, clothes, and accessories made by small businesses where the owners are personally involved in the creation of their goods. The result, unless the law is modified, is that handmade children’s products will no longer be legal in the US.

Everyone in the industry should have heard about this by now.
Some provisions in this law were made unfair to domestic “niche” producers.

But take a more typical case, our company, for example. Cardona Toys manufactures, designs and exports plush toys, we have to deal with compliance all the time. Any effort to strengthen the rules in the US has to be applauded. Newest EU directive is even tougher, and this is good too. Other countries have their own rules, at times a bit overwhelming. When we send products to Russia, every single shipment gets a medical certificate. In general, though, regulation is good for everyone, because the industry obviously cannot regulate itself. These measures lead to better innovative materials that are safer to kids. If a small plush toy maker in the US (there are almost none left) uses awful material, shouldn’t he be accountable too?
However, the lawmakers lumped absolutely everybody together, and that was plainly not smart nor too fair, hence the obvious outrage in this letter.

Cheers from http://www.cardonatoys.com

PS We have made a nice and compact toy safety page with appropriate links. Feel free to check. Also toy Industry Association is a good place to catch up with the US legislation and toy safety news.