Product Safety Remains Focus In The Age Of RTech

Today is an exciting time to be a consumer! Retailers work hard to establish trusted relationships with consumers. Every day, retailers and brands are launching innovative consumer products incorporating cutting edge technologies to meet customers' demands for new services and increased efficiencies. The ever-increasing volume of new products and rapid speed to market have created regulatory compliance, product safety and consumer privacy challenges for retailers. RILA maintains a community of member executives to help retailers navigate these new challenges and develop strong consumer product compliance programs.
 

The Consumer Products Committee serves as a forum for product compliance, quality assurance, product stewardship, sourcing, legal, and government affairs professionals to benchmark, network, and share information specific to retailers' product safety and compliance challenges and trends. Last week, RILA hosted the group for its Fall meeting in Washington, DC. Highlights from the event are below.

  • Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Commissioner Dana Baiocco presented on her priorities as a Commissioner for the year ahead including urging the agency to update its data sources and seek additional avenues of injury data to rely upon. 
  • CPSC General Counsel Patty Hanz presented to the group on where the agency's legal staff will focus their efforts in the coming year including urging RILA and RILA members to get involved in the CPSC budget process to help determine agency priorities. 
  • Mintz Levin P.C. Partners Chuck Samuels and Matt Howsare presented on CPSC regulatory reform and what to expect from the Commission into 2019. 
  • Founder and CEO of Whystle Lauren Bell provided a demonstration of the new app, which allows consumers to easily monitor and track relevant product recall notices. 
  • UL Connected Technologies VP & Chief Technical Officer Tom Blewitt and Bureau Veritas' Technical Director for Consumer Product Services Travis Norton presented on how testing labs are reviewing new technologies in the consumer safety world. 
  • Members also had robust benchmarking sessions on topics such as state chemical reporting programs and recall effectiveness measures being taken. 

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