About Quality
“Quality” is a word we commonly hear in daily life. “This product has a better quality than that”, “quality of that product is different from the others”.
“Quality”, a word meaning loads of work and efforts of many companies behind.
Why are safety standards strict for games, toys and educational tools?
Products around us all have their required quality standards. With no standards, we cannot tell which product is good and which is bad.
Kids are exposed to all kinds of games, toys and educational tools every day. Overwhelmed with curiosity, sometimes they play their “toys” in a manner totally beyond parents’ imagination. There is a necessity for toys to be developed and designed in a way to protect kids from danger in case of misuse.
Product Evaluation in development stage
An example will be drop test, a test to determine whether kids would have a chance to get hurt when they drop the product and break it.
Other tests like physical test will check the possibility of injury when the product is trampled on; or transportation tests, material safety tests, etc. Test contents* can add to nearly a hundred in sum . We call all evaluation tests done in the evelopment stage “reliability tests”.
*test contents are different between products.
A product in its development phase is never mature and only through passing successive assessments (reliability tests) can it be born as a safe and reliable product to market.
<Reliability tests>
・physical test (drop test, trample test, static loading test, torque test,… etc.)
・transportation test
・material safety test (toxicity, heavy metals, phthalate, … etc), test contents add up to nearly a hundred.
Koto’s original product, the “Piperoid®”, conforms to one of the world’s strictest standards (European Toy Standard EN71-3).