It was back in June I first explored the idea of making toys. I always knew (from my Facebook group) that UK has one of the hardest places to make toys just because of the rules we have to follow. With this in mind, I was discouraged from making toys by some and other pointing me in the way of another Facebook group (CE & UKCA Marked Soft Toy Support Network).
This group was a fountain of knowledge, I discovered that I needed to buy a testing pack and that once purchased I would have all the blank pages and templates needed to complete the testing, plus I could reuse these for every to
Overwhelmed by it all I decided to start small. I already had business pages on Facebook and Instagram, so I worked to make these better and create a concessive look across of my platforms. I did this with a new logo and just tidying up the pages. With the new logo the most clear way to go was with labels. I learnt you needed to have specific wording on your labels so these took me a long while. Every time I thought I was done there was something to do, or something I'd missed. I won't even talk about the issues I encountered with printing the damn thing.
After my label I went to work on my website, while looking into toy idea. As this point I was just going to create loads of animals to sell, rather than made to order toys. The website took a lot longer than I expected, I knew I needed a platform to sell on, but I just struggled to understand any of the website, until I found WIX. While I am still no expert in web design, WIX allows me to make this web page great without any knowledge.
By this point It's been 6 weeks since I first decided to embark on this journey and I am only just about to start the process of making my items. This is where I found out to make anything in the UK you need to have all materials up to certain standards. I now needed to find yarn that was compliant, My group above were amazing enough to have done a lot of this work for me, so I look through this amazing album and discover my fav brand included, great so with that I go out i buy all this yarn, I get home and before i start to cake it, I just drop a message about my yarn to my group and BOOM. It is no longer compliant. All yarn must have 3 certificates to ensure they don't contain harmful ingredient that could affect children. So with that I am now pointed into the new album that's better up to date and find a brand I know I like and can access. I took back all the wrong yarn and brought the new stuff.
This is when I changed my whole approach and decided to do made to order and now needed more yarn -.-. With this scout was born. After creating scout (In my Blog) I learnt that scout however, was to small for the fire testing and I now needed to make sausages in every colour used in the making of scout, ready for the fire testing.
But before I could get to testing anything I had to deal with all the paperwork. As I went down the list of paperwork, I found more items that needed to be completed. I needed to have UKCA files, Notes to include in my sent packaging, business cards, tags and safety forms, certificates for every material included. Documents for spending, documents for selling, document for each yarn included in my making. My poor one drive was getting fuller and fuller by the minute.
After I had finally finished the mountain of paper work I went onto Testing. To do this I took my already completed Scout and followed the guidelines in a specific order to say he was complete. This was done once fresh of the hook and then I washed him and did it all again. Testing includes includes hanging 7kg of weight off of each seam on my products, over 9kg of weight on my eyes. Poking and prodding each seam with specific weigh behind the poker and making sure nothing fits into my "small part tube". Finally I had to smash him hard on the group several time to insure pieces didn't break off. And like I said I did it once normal and another after washing and finally With that Scout was deemed safe
So yay my product is safe, but I had final test to do on the fabric before I could sell, and that was yes... burning it. Normal procedure would be to burn two versions of the finished work, but due to his small size it wasn't possible. Instead i had to create two "sausage" shape item in each colour used on scout and burn these. Once again one need be fresh and one needs to be washed, to ensure a complete knowledge of how the fabric reacts to fire.
So that a knowledge of basic selling law, a mountain of paperwork, safe materials, tag, website, packaging, building my item as well as sausages, and finally performing several very difficult test my toy is ready to be deemed as "safe" the last item on my check list is finding correct insurance, and I can finally sell.
Only took close to 3 months haha.
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