What a product certification company does for you

We take a product and a target market and return the document that lets it be sold there. In practice that is four stages, establishing which route applies, arranging accredited testing, obtaining the certificate or declaration, and acting as the local representative where the market requires one. Most clients engage at the first stage, because the route assessment is what determines whether the rest is three weeks or nine months.

Route assessment comes first, and it is cheap

The most expensive mistakes are made before any sample ships: testing to the wrong standard, applying to a body without the right accreditation, discovering a local representative is mandatory after the certificate was meant to issue. Re-testing is the largest avoidable expense in certification and representation is the longest-running one. A route assessment settles all three on paper, for a small fraction of the project cost, and it is what stops the large fractions being spent twice.

What the price depends on

We do not publish a price list — a figure quoted without seeing the product is wrong in one direction or the other. What moves it is this.

Four things account for almost all of the variation. How many pieces of legislation apply: a mains device with a radio module is assessed under one directive, the same device without the radio under two. Whether a third party has to be involved: self-assessment against harmonised standards is the cheap route, a notified or accredited body reviewing the file the expensive one. How much laboratory time the product needs: priced per standard and per sample, and for textiles per material and colourway rather than per garment. Whether a local representative is required — a recurring annual cost, and the item most often missing from a first estimate.

Send the product and the target market and you get a written, itemised quotation, normally within two working days. Scoping costs nothing and carries no commitment.

Testing at laboratories the destination accepts

Accreditation is per standard and per laboratory, never general. A laboratory accredited for one product standard is not automatically accepted for another, and a report from an unaccredited body can be technically excellent and still be refused. Where a product is going to several markets, one campaign specified for all of them beats one per market — a decision taken before the first booking. How we place testing.

The production site is assessed too under several schemes, and an audit is the item that turns a schedule from weeks into months. Factory audit and training covers what auditors ask for and how a site gets ready.

Certification, and the representation behind it

Several major schemes cannot issue a certificate to a foreign manufacturer at all. The Eurasian Economic Union requires an applicant registered in a member state; Brazil a company with a CNPJ; the European Union and the United Kingdom an economic operator established locally and named in the file. These are legal appointments with real obligations, not mailboxes, and where a client has no local entity we take the role — see authorised representative for why a distributor is usually the wrong holder.

The last thing checked is the artwork, and it is checked twice: by the certification body as part of the file, and at the border by an official comparing a carton against a document. Marking and labelling review covers what each market requires on the label.

What stays with you

The product and its design records. The design rationale, the bill of materials and the manufacturing records come from the manufacturer, and no consultant can write them retrospectively. Where they are thin, that is usually the real project — better found in week one than in month four when a certification body asks. What we can do with them is under technical documentation.

The four stages

Factory audits and registration regimes are the items that turn weeks into months. Both are visible at the route-assessment stage and neither can be compressed later.