Safety by Design: What Parents Should Know About Child-Product Standards

VMPL
New Delhi [India], November 14: Safety claims are common in the baby-products market, but they are meaningful only when supported by evidence. Supreet Gill, co-founder of Growgether, explains why recognised standards, independent testing and transparent disclosure should guide product design and purchasing decisions.
Before building a baby brand, I spent almost a decade working on the production side of my family’s fashion business in Shanghai, following earlier years in media. Together, these experiences taught me to look beyond how a product is marketed and ask deeper questions about how it is made, the materials used, and the standards it meets.
I saw the materials, the suppliers, the samples that were rejected and the relentless corrections behind a product that finally looks effortless. I learned that most of what decides a product’s quality is invisible by the time it reaches a shelf.
Then I became a mother, during the pandemic, far from family and without outside help. I began looking at baby products through both lenses at once. I could see how a product was being sold to me. I also wanted to know how it had been made, and what had been checked before it came anywhere near my son.
That second question is the one I believe our industry still answers far too quietly.
What Does Product Safety Really Mean?
In baby products, safety is too often treated as a feeling. A product looks sturdy, a brand sounds trustworthy, and a parent assumes the rest.
Real safety is something that can be tested and proven. It is a high chair that stays steady when a child leans over the side. It is a crib with gaps too narrow to trap a small hand, and a mattress free from harmful substances.
None of these can be judged from a product photograph, a well-shot video or a showroom floor. They can only be measured against a recognised standard, by someone independent of the company selling the product.
That is why I believe standards must come before marketing. Not only in importance, but in order.
Safety Starts at the Design Stage
Many people picture product safety as a final exam. The product is designed, a sample goes to a lab, and a certificate comes back. But by the time a product reaches certification, its most important decisions have already been made: how it is designed and built, which materials go into it, and who makes it.
So at Growgether, the first question in development is not about colour, features or price. It is which recognised safety standard the product must meet. Only then does the design work begin.
Our Apex crib is a good example. It is certified by Intertek to BS EN 716, the European standard for children’s cots, which tests the strength of the structure, the spacing between the slats and the height of the sides. Its finish passes EN 71-3, which limits harmful elements such as lead, arsenic and mercury.
Those requirements shaped the design from the start. The base lowers through three positions as a baby learns to sit and then stand, so the child always stays safely below the rail. The edges are rounded and the slats are fixed.
A laboratory test is also, by nature, a controlled one. Real homes are not. A product is cleaned repeatedly, moved from room to room and assembled by different caregivers over months of ordinary family life, so we design and test with that in mind.
I have come to see certification as confirmation, not the whole philosophy. A certificate should confirm a culture of safety. It should not have to create one.
Adapt Products to Families—Not Safety Standards
There is a quiet temptation in any price-sensitive market to treat safety as something that can flex. A slightly lighter frame here, a cheaper material there, a standard that is “not really needed” for this segment.
Our rule is the opposite. We never adjust the standard to suit a market or a price point. What we adapt is the design around it.
Our products are designed in Germany to European standards, the same benchmarks used in some of the most tightly regulated markets in the world. But they are made for Indian homes. That means designing for heat and humidity, for smaller living spaces and for frequent cleaning.
It also means designing for the way Indian families share care. A single product may be used by a mother, a father, a grandparent and a nanny in the same week, so it has to be intuitive enough that nobody needs the manual each time.
Our Golite travel stroller shows what this looks like in practice. It weighs 6.8 kg, folds with one hand and fits in an airplane cabin. Yet it is certified by Intertek to the same EN 1888 standard as our larger stroller, with a steel frame tested to carry a child up to 22 kg, a 5-point harness and an automatic lock that stops it folding while a child is seated. A lighter stroller should never be a less safe one.
Why Specific Testing Information Matters
Testing is only half of the responsibility. The other half is telling parents, clearly and specifically, what was tested and by whom.
“Certified” on its own tells a parent very little. Certified to what, by whom, and for which product? Different products carry different risks, so a single blanket claim across a whole range can hide more than it reveals.
That is why we prefer to name the specific standard for each product rather than make broad claims. Our car seat is certified to ECE R44/04 by TÜV SÜD. Our strollers are certified to EN 1888 and our crib to BS EN 716 by Intertek. Our high chairs meet EN 14988, our rocker meets EN 12790, and our baby carrier is certified to EN 13209-2 by KTI. These certifications are published on our website, because I would rather a parent check than simply trust us.
I would like to see this become the norm across the category, whoever the brand. At a minimum, a parent should be able to see three things before buying:
-        The exact standard the product was tested against.
-        The name of the independent body that did the testing.
-        The certificate itself.
None of this is complicated or costly to share. It only requires a brand to be confident in what it has built.
Marketing Must Explain Safety, Not Substitute for Evidence
None of this means marketing has no place in our industry. It has an important one. But its job should be to explain safety, not to stand in for it.
Good communication can tell a parent what EN 14988 actually checks in a high chair, or why the spacing of crib slats matters. It can help families understand that safety standards for baby products exist at all, and teach them to look for proof from any brand, including ours.
When a child is involved, some things are simply not up for negotiation. Safety, quality and integrity cannot be compromised because something is quicker, easier or more convenient to launch. I want our track record to show that we never released a product we would hesitate to use with our own children, and that we were just as careful about what we chose not to build.
When a product is truly safe, a parent stops thinking about it. They can sit down to dinner while the baby watches from the high chair, or buckle a child into the car seat without a second thought. That peace of mind should never be a marketing promise. It should be the result of standards met long before the marketing began.
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