CPSIA Button

Description

When the going gets tough, the tough get crafty.

In the wake of the dangerous offshore toy threat, the Consumer Product Safety Commission passed a broad-sweeping act that could potentially kill the craft market for children’s products. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act requires anyone who creates anything for children’s consumption to submit each of its products to third-party testing.

Though well-intentioned, it has a fatal flaw: the testing procedure costs anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars. Moreover, to change an already approved product in any way requires the altered product to be submitted for testing. Though large corporations can mortize the cost of this testing by producing tens of thousands of a particular article, an independent producer cannot. In a sense it gives large-scale toy anufacturers—the ones who put dangerous compounds in our kids’ toys—the only license to produce products for children. And anyone who violates this act risks hefty penalties and even jail time.

Well that ain’t cool, brothers and sisters. The craft community has proven itself incredibly responsible. We have an incredible integrity to stand behind—after all, our own children are often our primary customers.

So we’re rallying the troops. Our goal is to inspire people to write their senators and congressional representatives. And to spread the word, we’re making buttons. And to make sure they get out there in big numbers, we’re making them super-duper affordable.

For a buck sixtyfive, you get a button. These are high-quality buttons, so you can slap ’em where the sun shines. They measure 2 1/4 inches (57mm) wide.

That’s a small price to say you were part of a revolution.

Added on Nov 11, 2009