The Importance of Product Testing

At The Gift Scholars we produce merchandise, gifts & toys for some of the biggest names in the sports, leisure & retail industries. This brings with it a responsibility to our customers & to our end consumers to ensure that the products we create are safe & of a good quality.

We achieve this in two ways:

1. Careful selection of our manufacturing partners & maintaining good working relationships with them.
2. Rigorous testing of our products.

We hold SEDEX membership & we work only with SEDEX registered factories. This means that our factories are regularly audited to maintain quality & to ensure that ethical, safety & procedural guidelines & laws are adhered to.

We view our relationship with them as a partnership, & therefore work closely with them to improve working conditions, waste management processes & production standards.

A new line or material added to our range should always be tested before being brought to market. We use reputable testing houses SGS, Intertek & Eurofins.
Our production team members attend regular training courses to make sure that we are always working to the correct standards and complying with all legal regulations per country.
With regards to regulations and correct labelling of goods, the technical language can be a little baffling at first look. However, the basic principles of these standards are there to ensure that consumers can be safe in the knowledge that they are buying products that will not cause them unnecessary harm and that they are of a good enough quality for their intended purpose.

Testing for the majority of our plush & electronic toys covers regulation EN71; sections 1-3. These test for multiple aspects of safety & quality including:

Physical & Mechanical Hazards. Such as: points & metallic wires, hard edges, soft fillings, small parts, acoustics and protruding parts.
Labelling Requirements. Such as: washing/cleaning instructions, CE Mark compliance, Importer/Manufacturer details, Product I.D.
Flammability: General speed of flammability with additional tests for costumes, toys being worn by a child or climbed into.
Migration of Certain Elements: ‘Scraped-off materials’ from the product, to ensure that the product is not made from or contaminated with any harmful elements.

These standards are mandatory and should be freely available for all products our retail customers stock in store.

One of the product categories we specialise in is textiles.
We have built a reputation through years of supplying not just unique designs but also superior products, & we ensure this year-on-year reliability again through quality assurance testing.
The textiles we supply are tested for flammability & colour fastness.
Rub tests are performed on both wet & dry fabrics to check for migration of pigments, with bedding being washed to check that dyes do not run & that the colours remain vivid.

We are hugely proud of the high standards of the goods we produce & strive to maintain these levels as our product ranges expand & diversify

For further details regarding the compliance of our products please do not hesitate to contact us.