Join the HTA and CPSC Officials for a Chat Addressing CPSIA and Small Businesses

Friday, March 26, 2010

In cooperation with the Handmade Toy Alliance, the Consumer Product Safety Commission will be joining us in a Webinar to talk about what the CPSIA means for our community. This is your opportunity to get answers to your questions both specific and general about how the CPSIA affects your business.

Here are the details:

On Friday, March 26 at 11 a.m. EDT, (8 a.m. PDT) Senior CPSC Officials Jay Howell and Gib Mullan will be live on a Webinar for our members to talk about how the CPSIA has impacted small businesses.

Jay and Gib will share their insights and experiences about how the CPSIA is being implemented and enforced, how compliance with the law is possible, what has been stayed and what is in effect, what needs to be tested and what does not, and what the future holds.

Presentations by both officials will be followed by a question and answer session. Jay and Gib are doing this webinar as part of an effort by CPSC to connect with organizations like ours and to demystify the CPSIA for small business owners.

CPSC will record the session for those who can't make it.

You can help move the presentation into your areas of concern by sending in advance questions to the web address below. That will help us decide which topics will be most useful for you!

To participate in the webinar go to: www.cpsc.gov/webcast/index.html

Send in your questions before, during and after the webinar to:

HTAquestions@cpsc.gov. (This email address will be active until a month after the webinar to follow up on all questions.)

Engaging in the process of CPSIA reform

During the past several days, we've been working on understanding and reacting to Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) draft CPSIA technical correction bill. After over a year of activism, we were extremely pleased to see that Waxman's Commerce Committee has begun to address the unintended consequences of the CPSIA, especially the effects on small batch manufacturers.

We recognize that this bill is only the beginning of a long and imperfect process. And, we know that whatever emerges from this process may not contain everything we've been asking for. But, we feel that our input has been heard and continues to be considered, as evidenced by the bill's third party testing exemptions for "low volume manufacturers". Although this bill represents a true milestone for our cause, we feel that the draft bill's definition of "low volume" should be adjusted to reflect the per-unit testing costs of products produced in small batches rather than the overall size of the company. We are actively working on sharing those concerns with Waxman's office. Hopefully, we can arrive at a workable solution.

None of us in the Handmade Toy Alliance are lobbyists. In fact, we are all looking forward to the day we we can stop lobbying and go back to making and selling goods for children. But, we've been arguing for relief from third party testing requirements for small businesses from the beginning and we intend to keep trying until we succeed. For now, we feel that this draft bill should be viewed as the beginning of a process. And, we are extremely grateful to be included in that process.

Who we are: Results of our CPSIA Small Business Survey

Below are the results of our survey of small batch children's product manufacturers and retailers which we conducted this past weekend. 223 business owners participated in the survey, 135 of whom are HTA members. That means that we achieved a 95% confidence rate with a +/- 4.9% confidence interval for the purposes of describing the entire population of 420 businesses who are members of the HTA.

We're sharing this report with congress and the CPSC in hopes that it will help guide their legislation and rulemaking. One thing this survey makes clear is that there are a lot of very low volume toymakers and children's products manufacturers in this country who should not be overlooked.

Handmade Toy Alliance CPSIA Survey Results

Note: Revenue data was also collected and shared with congress and the CPSC but was omitted from this public version of the report for privacy reasons.