Safety Matters in the New Year

Happy
New Year! I hope that everyone enjoyed
time with their friends and family over the holiday season and trust that the New
Year finds you well and ready to take on the new and growing challenges of our
day. 2009 brings with it a long list of obstacles,
but also an enormous opportunity for change.
So, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, “God,
give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to
distinguish the one from the other.”

Included among those things we can and should change
is improving our systems and practices surrounding product safety matters. Writing laws such as those imposed by the
Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) is only one piece. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) must now execute. And while the commission and its staff have
their work cut out for them for sure, the toughest road will be traveled by the
manufacturers, importers and retailers who must now obey these new laws.

In
that light, my plan for this blog in 2009 is to provide information that will
help you keep your family safer, and information to help your company keep its customers safer. By presenting various resources, tools and
analyses, I hope to make complying with the CPSIA a bit easier and, should a
product recall become necessary, make realizing a successful outcome possible.

For
the past several years, we have been gathering data and analyzing every detail
related to product recalls. We are now preparing
to publishing our initial reports outlining some very interesting recall statistics. From the number of recalls occurring for each
product type and trends in country of manufacture, to the average cost of
recalling a product and the impact on a company’s stock price, if it is related
to consumer product recalls and it is quantifiable (and sometimes even if it’s
not), we have studied it. Please check
back often, as we will release reports as they become available and may offer
them here, on the blog, if the WeMakeItSafer.com site has not yet launched.

Welcome,
2009. Here’s to a great year to come.