Is the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act going to negatively impact your business? (If you’re not sure what the CPSIA is, you can learn more here but in a nutshell it’s an act that will require expensive component testing of kid products that is prohibitively expensive for some small business owners.)
I feel confident that people whose business involves hand crafted baby and kid items will find a way around this act, or it will be amended somehow.
Still, this is a good wake up call for anyone who relies solely on the sale of handmade products for their income stream.
It’s a call to action to:
Diversify Your Income
On this blog I have long encouraged product sellers to develop secondary income streams with ideas like affiliate marketing and creating information products.
Now is the time to get started on this if your business revolves around handmade baby and kid products. Like I said, I’m optimistic that the creative people who have these types of businesses will figure this thing out, but even still…
Your cheese is getting stinky. It’s time to find a new source of cheese.
Here are just a couple of ideas for you:
* Let’s say you make handmade wooden toys for kids. Could you write an ebook for parents on encouraging creativity with open-ended toys? Make sure you have an affiliate program for your product because I for one would promote it!
What about a cookbook with your favorite kid friendly recipes?
* Do you sew cloth diapers, baby slings or baby blankets? Could you start a review blog to publish well written, honest reviews of baby and toddler products? These reviews could be monetized with affiliate links and Google Adsense or other contextual ads.
A few random ideas that popped into my head:
* Create a cookbook for parents of allergic kids (wheat/dairy/corn/egg/soy/peanut/etc free recipes)
* Create a specialty diet cookbook (vegan/vegetarian/Paleo/raw/Weston A Price/whole foods/low carb/etc)
* Start a blog and write about what you know (start a recipe blog, a niche blog, a mommy blog, etc)
* Offer consulting services based on your area of expertise. People will pay for homeschooling advice, fitness advice, nutrition advice, cooking advice, marriage advice, business advice etc
* Offer your services as a ghostwriter or virtual assistant, niching yourself as an expert in a particular area based on your experience as a business owner (early childhood education or homeschooling for example). When you have a tight niche like this you can command higher prices per hour.
* Do you have any other ideas? Leave them in the comments area below!
Me and my Dad come from Germany and we specialize in beautiful wooden toys for boys. The CPSIA is now demanding that even though the toys conform with the high European standards, they all need to be retested by an accredited lab. AND they are requiring that each toy be tested – not the materials used. So if I want to sell 100 different models of wooden trucks, made of the same 3 materials, the toy maker in Germany has to pay for 100 tests! Needless to say, they can’t afford it so it and we can’t import them anymore. I may be only 3 but it doesn’t sound right to me!
Looks like I’ll have to rename my toy shop! Carl & Me – Ordinary Toys For Boys!
Hi,
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