Homemade Toys Industry, CPSIA, and Strange Bedfellows

Hipster moms and conservative congressmen join forces against the regulatory state.

In August 2008.—more than a year after the toy scandal broke—President George W. Bush signed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), which went into effect on February 10, 2009. The law bans lead and phthalates in toys, books, clothes, and any other object intended for children under 12. To enforce these rules, the law requires every toymaker, distributor, or retailer who sells products in the U.S. to certify each of its models through third-party testing, labeling every item with an individual date and batch number.

Overnight, a bunch of cheerful believers in good government found themselves on the wrong side of a do-gooding law. Under the terms of the new rules, their lead-free, hand-crafted toys were now illegal until proven clean.

 Cecilia Leibovitz is the kind of person who writes sentences like: “Children are individuals, each with their own unique personality, so I just couldn’t feel good about buying mass-produced toys and clothing from cookie-cutter chain stores.” Leibovitz is the 36-year-old founder of Craftsbury Kids, a Vermont-based online vendor of handmade toys. She sells the type of gear that arty, upscale, NPR-listening parents can’t get enough of: sock monkeys, baby onesies featuring a “hand-stamped and appliquéd” crow with “crocheted flowers and recycled fabric grass,” even a carved wooden “707 Air Force One plane” with “a beautiful silk screened portrait of President John F. Kennedy.” So no one was more surprised than Leibovitz last winter when she found herself on the wrong side of federal law, fighting against consumer safety groups, and building alliances with Republican congressmen to defend free markets." Read more here.

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