Why I Know My Toys Are Safe — And What It Took to Be Sure
I’ll be honest with you: when I started making felt toys and play food sets for children, I already knew they were safe. I made them. I knew every material, every stitch, every piece of fill. I’d been a classroom teacher. I understood what “safe for kids” actually meant in practice — not as a label, but as a daily reality.
But knowing something yourself and being able to show it to the world are two different things. So over the past year, I went through the process of doing exactly that.
This is what that looked like.
Learning the Rules — All of Them
Children’s toys sold in the United States fall under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) and are regulated by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). In Europe, the equivalent framework is the EU Toy Safety Directive, supported by standards including EN 71. These aren’t suggestions — they’re the legal baseline for what a children’s product has to meet.
My husband spent weeks going through both — the U.S. and EU frameworks in parallel, cross-referencing requirements, reading the technical standards, and mapping out exactly what applied to our specific products. Felt toys. Soft play food. Felt masks. Small batch. Handmade. Every detail mattered, because the rules aren’t one-size-fits-all — they depend on what you make, who it’s for, and how it’s made.
Whenever there was any uncertainty — any point where two reasonable people might read a requirement differently — we took the conservative interpretation. Every time. That was a conscious decision from the start.
Third-Party Testing: Choosing to Do More Than Required
As a small handmade business, we’re not legally required to use a CPSC-approved third-party laboratory for all our testing. That option exists for small batch manufacturers. We chose not to take it.
Instead, we sent everything to a CPSC-accepted independent testing lab. Not because we doubted our materials — we didn’t. But because “I’m confident” and “a certified lab confirmed it” are two very different things to hand to a parent. We wanted to be able to hand parents the second one.
28 Types of Felt. Zero Prohibited Substances.
Our toys and masks use 28 different felt varieties — different colors, textures, and weights. Every single one of them was tested.
The testing screened for heavy metals, phthalates, and other restricted substances under both U.S. and EU requirements. The results? Across all 28 samples, the overwhelming majority came back as Not Detected. The few that showed any trace of regulated substances came in at a small fraction of the permitted limits — we’re talking roughly one-tenth of what’s allowed, in isolated cases. Nothing borderline. Nothing that required a decision.
That result didn’t surprise me. But seeing it in a lab report — in black and white, with a certification number on it — was something else entirely.
Flammability: Every Product Passed
Children’s toys — particularly soft goods — have to meet flammability standards under both CPSIA and EN 71. All of our products passed flammability testing without exception.
Polyester felt, as it turns out, performs well here. But again: we didn’t want to rely on “as it turns out.” We wanted the test report.
The Small Parts Test — And What Happened When the Lab Got Rough With Our Toys
This is the one parents ask about most, and honestly, it’s the right question. Small parts are a genuine choking hazard for young children, and the standards — both ASTM F963 in the U.S. and EN 71-1 in Europe — are specific and demanding.
The testing lab subjects products to abuse testing: dropping, twisting, pulling, compression. They are not gentle. The idea is to simulate what a determined toddler might actually do to a toy — and then some.
Our products held up. Across the full range, all but two items passed small parts testing completely intact — meaning they didn’t break apart, shed filling, or produce any small components even after the lab was done with them. For those two items, a single element in each didn’t meet the size threshold. We redesigned both. The updated versions passed.
What stayed with me from that part of the process: the lab treated our toys quite roughly, and they survived. Structurally, they came through even better than I expected — and I had high expectations. Handmade, tightly stitched felt is tougher than it looks.
Labeling and Warnings: The Part Nobody Talks About
Safety isn’t just about the product itself — it’s also about what’s on the label. Age grading, choking hazard warnings, country of origin, tracking information: these have specific requirements under U.S. and EU law, and getting them right matters.
We’ve been careful here from the beginning. Every MorKuzuNY product ships with complete, accurate labeling that meets the requirements of both markets. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s part of what “safe” actually means end-to-end.
What This Process Actually Felt Like
Long. Detailed. At times genuinely tedious — there’s a lot of technical reading involved in understanding what CPSIA and the EU Toy Safety Directive actually require, and a lot of cross-checking to make sure nothing was missed.
But the end of it felt different from what I expected. I went in already confident in what I was making. I came out with something more than confidence: documentation, test reports, and the knowledge that an independent laboratory had looked at our products with the same scrutiny we’d applied ourselves — and agreed.
That’s genuinely reassuring in a way that’s hard to describe. When a parent opens one of our packages and hands it to their child, I know what went into making sure it was ready for that moment.
That matters to me more than any certification number.
— Natallia, MorKuzuNY