Rick Brenner, CEO of supplier Prime Line, based in Bridgeport, Conn., has been appointed to the board of directors of the International Consumer Product Health & Safety Organization (ICPHSO), the world’s leading consortium of businesses, scientists, legal professionals, government officials and product safety advocates dedicated to consumer health and safety concerns.
ICPHSO is one of the oldest and largest multinational organizations dedicated to improving knowledge and product safety worldwide. Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2013, ICPHSO holds annual meetings where experts in several fields discuss the best ways to design products, to create standards, to inform legislation and to protect consumers. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to help our industry,” Brenner said. “ICPHSO is really all about product safety.”
“When we think about product safety in this industry, we focus primarily on ‘regulatory compliance’: What will our strategy be for Prop. 65? What’s involved with the Illinois lead law? How do we comply with the apparel decorating rules under CPSIA?” he explained. ICPHSO acknowledges these regulatory concerns, but addresses much more, such as the importance of developing products that are safe from the ground up by designing out defects in the first place. “It’s really a much bigger perspective, where we’re part of the whole, but not the whole.”
Brenner became involved with ICPHSO in February 2008, when he attended its annual conference in Washington, D.C. that year, volunteering with the organization and joining its membership committee. At that first conference, he noted that there was only one other attendee from the promotional products industry, a distributor from California. However, since the passage of Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August 2008, representation from the industry has expanded greatly. “We probably had 25 to 30 industry attendees last year, including representatives from PPAI, QCA, and PRAG, PPAI’s Product Responsibility Action Group,” he said.
Brenner’s appointment to the board of directors marks the first time a member of the promotional products community has had a presence in ICPHSO’s governing body. Since the organization has participation from the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC), global corporations, and associations that determine voluntary compliance standards, Brenner will be able to introduce the industry’s platform to some of strongest influencers in product safety.
“The ICPHSO board is an exciting opportunity for several reasons,” he said. “It gives our industry more visibility to showcase the great strides we’ve made in product safety management, it gives us the opportunity to improve by learning how product safety is managed by experts in other industries and from other countries, and it gives us the opportunity to give back—to make contributions that can help others as ICPHSO and its many programs has helped us. It’s the only way that organizations like ICPHSO become great and stay that way—by giving back as much as you get. It’s a great honor to be in the company of such accomplished professionals as my colleagues on the ICPSHO board.”
Brenner, who also serves on the PPAI board of directors, will serve an initial three-year term on ICPSHO’s board effective immediately. His next meeting with the board will be at the ICPHSO 2013 Annual Meeting and Training Symposium in Arlington, Va. later this month.
