When Children are the Target Audience

At the beginning of the month, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of 85,000 Disney-branded flashlights that were kitted by HALO Branded Solutions in promotional bags for hospitals. The totes were decorated with several big brands out of the Disney stable like Pixar characters, Star Wars, and ESPN, and included playing cards, a journal, decals, a silicone bracelet, and postcards. Included in the bag was also a projector flashlight.

The problem, according to the CPSC, is that a child can disassemble the projector flashlight, remove the four button cell batteries inside, and then potentially ingest and/or choke on them. So far, there have been two reports of the batteries being ingested, with one child requiring surgery to remove them. 

"Several years ago, we established and tested a product recall protocol that was reviewed and approved by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Ombudsman," Terry Maguire, senior vice president of HALO, said in a Promo Marketing interview. "When our client notified us of the concern, we immediately implemented the voluntary recall steps detailed in our recall plan and in coordination with Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) guidance."

I won’t judge the level of HALO’s culpability one way or the other here — the inevitable lawsuits coming out of this will likely do that. HALO’s legal position regarding the company’s recall protocol is a prudent public stance for any distributor facing a product failure — trying to establish that the company has done everything by the books. But that’s not a proactive stance with a customer-centric focus, it’s a reactive one, and speaks only to a recall AFTER product failure has been discovered. What should a distributor do to prevent product failure BEFORE it happens, and especially when sourcing child-appealing products needing to meet a higher standard? Quite honestly, nothing irritates me more than when distributors don’t do their due diligence when sourcing children’s products — it’s unconscionable.

The CPSC has some clear guidelines for products intended for children under the age of three, others for kids ages 3-6, and even up to ages 6-12. Basically, the CPSC requires a written Children's Product Certificate in which the manufacturer, importer, or private labeler certifies that the children's product complies with all applicable children's product safety rules for the intended age group. The focus on children’s product safety is more intense than general use products when it comes to lead content of the toy itself, lead paint content, and small parts that can break off or, as in this case, small batteries that can be ingested. 

Certification of children's products must be based on the results of a third-party testing laboratory that provides testing services and results, but ultimately does not issue the children's product certificate. It’s the manufacturer, importer of record, or private labeler that is responsible for drafting and issuing the Children's Product Certificate. Button batteries fit the exact definition of a “small part” in the CPSC regulations: any object that fits completely into a specially designed test cylinder 2.25 inches long by 1.25 inches wide, or approximating the size of the fully expanded throat of a child under three years old.

But perhaps the best strategy is to minimize risk for your clients in the first place. Speaking from personal experience on these front lines, the more experience I gained as an end user, the fewer children’s products we sourced. Our catalog needed to be filled out with some child-appealing SKUs, but we chose soft goods and paper products over toys and jewelry every time. In the end we decided it just wasn’t worth the risk. No campaign is worth putting children in danger, the client in danger, or putting the company in a situation that could potentially result in risk we couldn’t control. 

We’ve talked before that the risk of product failure extends to far more than the potential of very unfortunate injuries to consumers. Your clients have loss of goodwill in the relationship with their customers based on a promotional product they sourced from you, which is the opposite of the way we hope our industry works. You don’t want to be the reason your client goes running away from promo products to the safety of gift cards with their hair on fire in the future.

Finally, there are the PR challenges and the loss of customer confidence that come with any product failure. Unfortunately, it can paint with a wide brush across a distributor’s entire catalog. The CPSC remedy for consumers who received the flashlight as part of this campaign is to take the toy away from their kids, contact HALO to return it prepaid, and get a $5 gift card for their trouble in return. What are the chances you think this will actually happen? How many customers might completely miss seeing that recall notice and let their children continue to play with a potentially life-threatening toy? In my book, even one is one too many.

But the business remedy for both HALO and their client, the Starlight Children’s Foundation, that distributed the bags to hospitals, may be a little more complicated. The word of the product failure has spread in widely varied media outlets outside the promo industry, with coverage in USA Today, WGN, PENNLive, Jacksonville’s talk radio WOKV, ConsumerAffairs.com, USRecall News, and even DisneyDining.com. Reputational damage, while not the same as physical damage to an end user of a dangerous product, can and often does have lasting impact. Is it worth it? I don’t ever think so. 

That’s why the old saying “no news is good news” must apply to your product safety protocols. Every one of the articles, and the CPSC recall announcement on Twitter to 134,000 followers, connects two facts: a child needing surgery to remove the button battery they swallowed, and the distributor that has the responsibility for product failure as the importer of record. In this instance, HALO has no supplier to point the finger at- they are identified as the importer of record. Beyond the third-party testing, and beyond the certificates, was there not an adult in the room somewhere who could have simply checked the battery door on a couple of production samples before shipping 85,000 pieces?