Paul Bellantone and I walked to dinner after the first day of PPAI’s 2015 Product Responsibility Summit and talked about the same thing we always do: the best concerts we’ve seen recently. (Foo Fighters and the Smashing Pumpkins, for the record.) We also talked about the summit and the state of promotional product safety. Standing…
Read More
On more than one occasion I have taken the easy road and asked a question of a colleague rather than do a little simple work with a search engine to find the answer for myself. Sometimes I get a quick response to my question that looks more like alphabet soup; “LMGTFY: Let Me Google That For You.”
Read More
Commissioners of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, old and new, are in print this week. While style and subject are in stark contrast, both are worth a read.
Read MoreThere aren’t many distributors who would describe themselves as manufacturers. But under CPSIA, the majority of promotional products distributors—at least those who buy blank apparel from a wholesaler and then send it out to have it decorated—are just that.
Read MoreIn the four years since the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) was signed into law, the promotional products industry has struggled mightily to figure out how to apply it to what we do every day. Nothing has come easily. Perhaps because most promotional products don’t start out as children’s products and perhaps because the “toys” we sell are mostly for adults, there always seems to be a “yes, but” when we try to understand CPSIA in the context of the world we live in.
Read More
Remember back in the day when you combed your hair, brushed your teeth, put on your best pair of khakis and a new shirt—all for your classroom photo? That’s what factories do on audit day.
Read More
The recent wave of suicides at the Foxconn manufacturing plant in China has served as an eye-opener to what life is like living in a factory culture. Proposed wage increases across Chinese factories have created a dialog in the U.S.
Read More
I recently interviewed Mark Trotzuk, president of Boardroom ECO Apparel, for one of the articles I’m currently writing for our upcoming June responsibility supplement, which is a mini-issue about all kinds of great stuff like corporate social accountability and environmental stewardship.
Read More
Something very exciting is happening. Or, at this point, it’s already happened, but on the first day of PPAI, when it hadn’t happened yet, I had that static electricity feeling that something big was about to happen. My esteemed colleagues and I were on tap to help announce the creation of the industry’s first Quality Certification Alliance. And I was excited.
Read More
All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others. I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul. —Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi
It is true, we are all guilty. Industrialized nations on the whole have enjoyed an expansive (and ultimately, expensive) period of self-centeredness. Famed Victorian-era psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud would have diagnosed mankind as being severely orally fixated. Trapped in the earliest stages of child development, we’re stuffing ourselves with as much as our mouths can handle—we have been needy, fiscally greedy and most seriously focused on our own self-gratification, regardless of
Read More