The CPSC continues to recommend that parents, childcare facility owners and school administrators check every belonging and new purchase on the CPSC website to make sure it has not been recalled. While we strongly support the idea of looking for recalls, using the government site to do so simply is not practical.
Depending on the type and age of product, it can take five to ten minutes or more using the CPSC site to determine if a particular product has been recalled. This is because each product must be searched individually using an archaic search system that requires review of text based lists and multiple clicks before one can be even relatively confident that the item they are checking has not been recalled. To make sure a home is free from recalls would take about 60 hours, assuming 500 products, which is probably fewer than most of us own. (Consider that the kitchen and garage alone have well over 200 items each in tools, gadgets and appliances, and that the average baby registry checklist includes about 100 items.)
WeMakeItSafer turns the traditional search model on its head. Rather than looking for each specific item that may or may not be in the recall database, consumers instead look through images of recalled products to see if they recognize something they own. It seems paradoxical but, because humans are incredibly visual and capable of processing information in pictures at high rates of speed, this method is much faster, even with hundreds or even thousands of recalled products. Thanks to an image gallery that is organized by product categories and can be narrowed by an array of criteria, one can quickly skim through potentially relevant recalls.
Using WeMakeItSafer it would only take one to two hours to make sure the same 500 product home is free of recalls, and the results would be much more accurate. After consumers have conducted a complete search once, they can sign up for a bi-monthly email that includes images of newly-recalled items in order to stay up to date. Again, being able to quickly skim through images is a much more efficient alert system than that of the CPSC, which includes lengthy text that consumers are unlikely to read. To sign up just send an email to InformMe@WeMakeItSafer.com .
If a consumer needs to look up a specific item, such as one they want to sell or give away, that is much faster on the WeMakeItSafer site as well. Because we have built advanced filtering options and, again, results are returned with images, it is far faster than hunting around on the CPSC site.
The first problem we set out to fix with regard to consumer product safety was this issue regarding recalled product identification. We could not be more pleased with the search system we developed – a true labor of love, it is our first free tool for consumers. We hope you find it as helpful as we do. Please let us know what you think.
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