My First Blog!!!!
Welcome to the maiden voyage of the MSR Blog. I am hoping to use this blog as an opportunity to express my views and opinions on the current state of the testing industry, and to do so without getting sued.
I will warn everyone right from the start that my views are not necessarily what most people would consider to be the “norm” when it comes to consumer product testing (or most other things that go on in this world), so consider this your first and last warning - Now, lets begin this journey!
Background - I am the Co-Founder and Majority Owner of MSR Laboratories, LLC, a full service Consumer Product Testing Laboratory. MSR was started in 2004 as a consulting firm with the belief that the only way to improve the quality of consumer products (especially toys) was to apply basic quality and safety principles to products while they were still in the design stage. I have never believed that you can test quality into a product (although it appears that most laboratories have been attempting to disprove this theory by testing your products for everything they can come up with - and you have the invoices to prove it!). That being said, we have transitioned from only offering consulting services and have added our product testing division in support of our design services. Now that we have gotten the background information out of the way it is time to talk about something a little more interesting ( I realize that this was a brief background about MSR, for more information poke around our website or feel free to contact us directly and we would be happy to bore you with our story).
We just completed our second year of Exhibiting at the International Toy Fair in NYC, it was better than last year and also more informative. The first thing that we learned was that there were a lot of Laboratories Exhibiting this year, far more than past years (I have been attending ToyFair for 10 Years). For the most part we had no idea who these labs were, we knew the traditional big guys but WOW there were a lot of new companies that popped up looking to cash in on the new regulations.
Generally speaking we love competition, in fact we take great pride in our openness towards competition, we are one of the few labs that openly invite our competitors into our facility to see how we do things, the strange thing is that we do not get invited into our competitors facilities ( I wonder why that is?). For this occasion though we were somewhat at a loss on how to handle the situation. You see, these labs that have opened up have no experience, we even had the lab manager from a lab in RI come by our booth, he was very friendly and overall appeared to be a nice guy, however he was handling one of our “Small Parts” Tubes, he asked us what it was, even joked that it looked like a shot glass. For those of you who know this business you know that everyone should know what a Small Parts Tube is, especially an ISO approved Testing Laboratory.
Our main issue is that when the CPSIA came out it required that labs be accredited to ISO 17025 for each testing method that they perform under the CPSIA requirements. Sounds great right, testing labs have to be accredited in order to perform testing, thus giving the illusion that they are qualified to perform testing for this Federal Law. What no one talks about is that ISO Accreditations are largely based on the management of data and paper trails and not on the actual competency and experience of the lab. This has opened up the floodgates for anyone that has the proper equipment or the funds to obtain the proper equipment to be approved to test for a Federal Standard.
I know that some of you are probably thinking that if a Testing Lab gets the proper Certifications then they must be qualified to perform the testing, however, our friends from the RI Lab clearly proved otherwise. In fact we talked with many of the other labs at Toy Fair that we had never heard of and without fail they all lacked in the appropriate knowledge and experience to effectively test for Compliance to the CPSIA.
I guess what I am trying to say to everyone is to beware of who you are working with, make sure that they have the experience and expertise to actually conduct the testing that you require, it is afterall your name on the products and your reputation.
Feel Free to contact us regarding any questions or concerns.
