[lincolnapparel]

I've been selling at the local market for about 2 months now and I've noticed that I get a lot of families who'd love to buy T-shirts for their kids (not to mention, my bright colorful designs tend to attract a lot of kids). This has me thinking seriously of starting a kid's line. I'd love to do this, but the CPSIA law that takes effect next year has me worried that I'd have to get each batch of kid's T-shirts tested (unless the screen printer does this, but I doubt they do) in order to comply with the law, which would likely make it too expensive for me to sell kid's T-shirts.

Anybody else dealing with this right now or have any advice? It's kind of sad, since I'm not a big importer who gets stuff made in China with lead paint; in fact, one of the major components of my line is that all of my shirts are made ethically in the USA and printed locally in Illinois.

 

[gcloche]

The SGIA has been doing a lot of work on behalf of the industry to get the CPSC to review the requirements. There really are 2 parts of this. A tracking label and the actual testing. The blank manufacturers insert a tracking label at this time in the blank garments and maintain a databse linking these tracking labels back to all the necessary information related to the date, place and lot numbers of the production of the blanks.
It gets way harder to meet the requirements for a printer. One option they were discussing was having you simply incorporate a number within your design. All you need to do is provide a manner in which a consumer of your products can contact you and obtain the relevant information. The compliance on the testing requirements for printing is a whole other kettle of fish because they initially wrote the rules to not accept any forward movement of compliance testing. So Rutland could test its inks and send you the documents. You however were not able to use that test result as your own. I know the SGIA was wiorking on that part of your issue. I would suggest you contact them and ask for feedback