How Best Years keep their products safe

Following hard on the heels of Fisher Price's recall of some Seseme Street and Dora the Explorer toys Mattel today announced the biggest product recall in UK history. Despite there being no recorded incidents of harm caused to children Mattel has voluntarily recalled lines with small magnets (including Polly Pockets and other well known brands) as new stringent checking proceedures have high lighted that there may be issues with children swallowing the magnets

The problem springs from success. When you need to bring in hundreds of thousands of toys to meet retailer demand then no one factory can cope with the demand. This means that manufacturing is sub contracted to smaller factories who in turn sub contract to smaller companies and so on. Very soon, despite the best efforts of reputable companies such as Mattel the process becomes hard to control

This is probably the same issue which caused TopShop embarassment when The Sunday Times revealed that some of its workers were earning a pittance

Best Years manufacture in runs of just 2,500 units at a time and this means we never ever have to sub contract. It also means that we sometimes run out of stock! As a soft toy wholesaler this is something we would rather face than increase our run sizes.

Also we design our toys to exceed safety standards. For instance our baby toys have embroidered eyes rather beads for extra safety

This year we will introduce crochet toys and more knitted toys as well as Fair Trade toys and it is therefore getting increasingly complicated to manage our stock. But we still believe that small is beautiful and thats why our production runs will stay small.