Safer Children’s Products Save Lives

 

Join KID’s fight to help ensure built-in product safety.

While no one sets out to design a product that puts our most vulnerable consumers—infants and children—at risk, each year tens of thousands of kids are injured and hundreds die in incidents associated with infant and children’s products.

At KID we have spent the last two decades fighting for product safety. Our mission is to save lives by enhancing transparency and accountability through safer product development, better education and stronger advocacy for children.

The KID Design Safety Toolkit, a brand-new tool launched in July 2022, is a free, online course designed to provide small and medium sized children’s products companies with the information and tools they need to design, develop, and market products more safely. The Toolkit is a much-needed resource in the children’s products market.

Many small and mid-sized organizations have great ideas or a clear vision of the need from their own experiences but aren’t skilled in product safety or child development. On top of that, they may not have all the resources needed to ensure product safety once their products are in the home and in real-world use.

The KID Design Safety Toolkit will provide them with these tools. The Toolkit is now live – view our press release. Take the course today!

This mission-driven offering represents the culmination of several years of work from a cross-functional team of experts in children’s products across all facets of development, from product design to research, safety, testing, legal, marketing and more.

It is a labor of love for our organization, and we are thrilled to bring the opportunity to join our effort to like-minded partners. View our promo video below.

 

KID Design Safety Toolkit Content Overview

  • What can happen if you do not keep the end user in mind
  • The role of research—and how to incorporate that at any budget level
  • Designing to encourage intuitive and safe use
  • Marketing with an eye toward safety
  • Age grading and developmental considerations
  • Understanding consumer behavior—and designing to ensure safety in real-world use
  • Deep dive into specific safety considerations for key infant and children’s product categories including Sleep, At Home, Out & About and Play
  • Knowledge checks and certificate of completion to ensure engagement and knowledge gain
  • Downloadable resources to bring the principles covered in the toolkit into real practice

KID Design Safety Toolkit at a Glance

WHO?

Entrepreneurs, small businesses and those new to toy or juvenile product manufacturing and retailing.

WHY?

Help designers and companies integrate safety into their design and development process to address children’s product safety issues up-front, thereby reducing product risk and improving child safety.

HOW?

The KID Design Safety Toolkit is a series of instructional modules that uses research, product examples, and real-life situations to address safety across the four key areas of children’s products:

How Can You Support This Effort?

To make the KID Design Safety Toolkit effective and provide users with tangible actions they can take to make safer products, we need to invest in the project. We are anticipating a cost of $200,000 to finish and market the first phase, including curriculum development, writing and editing, filming, graphic design, and building it into a final product that encourages user engagement and learning. The second phase, providing product category specific information and building the Toolkit into a community will have a similar cost.  KID has received generous support from Amazon, BreathableBaby, ASTM International, QIMA, and Etsy.  We are now looking for like-minded partners that see the value in safer products and accessible guidance to those new to product design, especially for children. Support can be in the form of grants, exchange of services, or sponsorships.

For more information contact KID Executive Director Nancy A. Cowles.