We can't say enough good things about Hanna Andersson, the Portland-based manufacturer of gorgeous, high-quality, organic clothing. We feature their children's pajamas in the ZRecs Guide for Safer Children's Products because they use tags in their sleepwear and their close-fitting, cotton designs are flame-retardant free (not so with their looser, dress-like garments, due to U.S. regulations requiring them). The company is also one of the best corporate citizens out there, so take a peek too at the many ways they support charities with their work.

Hanna Andersson clothes are pretty expensive, but the company is in the middle of a semi-annual sale, which means that these clothes are suddenly (and briefly) within reach for a lot of people who otherwise couldn't afford them. If you're used to buying super-cheap clothing, the sale prices of $15-$20 may still look high, but we think at the sale prices these garments are a great buy.

It isn't clear when this sale ends, so if $20 for some really nice kids' pajamas sounds like something worth buying, check out this handy (and lengthy) single page showing all of the items on sale.

Hanna Andersson is one of the many companies featured in the ZRecs Guide that do not sell through Amazon.com, and thus do not earn ZRecs any affiliate income. ZRecs is committed to sharing information about a wide array of companies like these, as well as providing detailed information about products we do not recommend.

[Via Baby Cheapskate]

Onesies, bodysuits, creepers - whatever you call them, a lot of parents are in the market for some one-piece baby outfits that have tags. (Here's why.) We've had a lot of people asking where they can find some, and until now we had few answers that were very affordable - a lot of "premium" brands, as well as silkscreen or small-batch shops, sell them with tags, but prices range from $16-$24, not exactly doable for most of our budgets. We even looked around at onesie print-on-demand shops to see if we could find a source to offer them directly at cost, but CafePress and others started at $10, which didn't seem low enough.

So we're happy to announce we've discovered one incredibly cheap offer to share with readers - Hanes' Playwear line, which for some reason is selling (we presume temporarily) on Hanes.com for $3 apiece. They cost $10 apiece on Amazon, so head straight to the company site to get a great deal on replenishing your baby's wardrobe, if that's what you're looking at needing to do.

Here's a direct link to the onesies on sale - they're available in pale pink, pale blue, pale gray, pale yellow, and white, at sizes from newborn to 18-24 months. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they'll be running out soon due to an unforseen surge in demand, or they will be increasing the direct-sale price.

Links above are affiliate links, so any purchases you make on the Hanes site through it provide us with a commission. Feel free to share the link to this post with friends, too. Twitterers, here's a tiny link to this post: http://tinyurl.com/5elb2m

Michael Casey, the CEO of Carter's, Inc. was kind enough to grant us an interview on the evolving story of children's allergic reactions to some of the company's tagless labels. We used the opportunity to get official answers to a lot of questions that had been bothering us since we started investigating the issue back in August.

Casey has been at Carter's for 15 years, and was the company's CFO before being appointed to the CEO post this summer. He warned me at the beginning of our phone conversation that there might be areas he would be less able to discuss given the lawsuit filed against the company earlier this week, but there were few questions he avoided answering, and we appreciated his frankness. Almost everything you're about to read here has not been published anywhere before.

Going tagless

Casey stated that Carter's infant garments have had tagless labels since "the end of 2005." I asked him if there was a cost savings involved in switching from cloth tags to tagless labels. "That's not why we made the change," he said. "We made the change because consumers overall find tagless garments to be more comfortable." Janell Cleveland, Carter's Senior Director of Consumer Affairs, later told us that while there is a cost savings associated with shifting from cloth to synthetic tags, tagless labels are actually more expensive than either type of tag.

I suggested to Casey that a decline in fabric tag quality and a shift from natural fabrics to synthetics for clothing tags may have caused the problem tagless labeling attempted to solve, but Casey did not agree with this assessment. "It isn't consistent with my experience," he said.

Design changes

Carter's maintains that the problem is isolated to its Fall 07 clothing, and although we have received a few reports of consumers whose infants have had reactions to other lines, the vast majority of the reports we have seen do implicate the Fall 07 line. For that release of the company's infant clothing, Carter's redesigned its tag to have a solid background with a relatively large imprint. When it came time to tinker with products for the next line (Spring 08) they switched to a design with a clear background and much less ink.

One key to understanding how the allergic reaction issue evolved at Carter's is an awareness of their product development and release cycle. Casey was unable to nail down exactly when the company received its first complaints about the labels, but Cleveland has since informed us that the company began receiving complaints in November 2007. "The new Spring 2008 label (the design with less ink) actually started being used in production the first week of June 2007," she wrote in an email to Z Recommends. "We received our first contact about a rash early in November 2007. The thing that most people don’t realize is that the Fall 2007 product was shipping from May 2007 through September 2007."

In other words, the company had already redesigned the label before a single case of skin irritation had been reported. Casey affirmed that the change in design from the Fall 07 line had nothing to do with any complaints that might have been received about irritation. "The label for Spring 08 was not changed for any reason other than aesthetics," he said.

Casey also offered up the previously undisclosed name of the manufacturer of their labels, Avery-Dennison, a well-known brand among households for its paper labels and a leading manufacturer of heat-transfer labels. Casey said Avery tagless labels are used in "billions" of garments each year, in clothing both for children and for adults. "In using these labels, we are in very good company," he said.

But there's another chapter to this story, and only time will tell if it is relevant to its final telling.

The switch to a "greener" tag

A crucial element that was missing from this story prior to our interview is that Carter's has since switched its label formulation, specifically for the Spring 09 line, which should be hitting stores soon. Through their Fall 08 clothing lines, Carter's used the supplier's Halo-Free Heat Transfers; for the Spring 09 line, they are using Halo-Free ECO Heat Transfers. (The term "halo-free" refers to the fact that both labels lack a bordering translucent "stamp" area and only show printing where ink is desired.)

The exact chemical formulations and ingredients of such products are carefully guarded trade secrets, and may not even be available to the companies that make use of them. Where technical data is absent, however, marketing materials can provide some clues. The benefits of this "ECO" label type, as outlined in Avery-Dennison's product brochure, include:

• Eco-Friendly: water-based inks, PVC-free, no harmful substances


• Meets Öko-Tex 100 Class 1 - suitable for skin contact for babies


• Contains no Azo dyes, no formaldehyde, heavy metals or vinyl products

It may be tempting to simply invert these bullet points to garner a "shadow list" of descriptors of the company's non-"ECO" labels. The implications, of course, are that the standard Halo-Free labels may not use water-based inks, and may contain PVC, Azo dyes, formaldehyde, heavy metals, or vinyl products; there are no claims in the standard Halo-Free Heat Transfer's label that it is free of any of these things. But in fact, this is not sufficient to establish with certainty that these standard labels do contain any of those specific substances, although the possibility is there; since they were likely not even submitted for potential certification under the strict Öko-Tex 100 standard, there is a chance that even Avery may not know exactly what is in them, beyond what the government (using ASTM standards) requires them to test for.

Cleveland stated that independent testing of the labels conducted by Carter's confirmed that the standard labels did not exceed any ASTM limits for Azo dyes, heavy metals, or lead, and had "never contained formaldehyde."

Cleveland stated to Z Recommends that the shift from one formulation to another was consistent with a general trend within the industry to improve on previous formulations of tagless labels. She could not comment on whether Avery-Dennison or Carter's first suggested the switch, but said she believed that Avery-Dennison planned to eventually phase out the old style of labels in favor of this alternative formulation. "Just as we're always working to innovate to make our products safer, they are too," she said.

One possible cause for a rapid shift towards the new labels, at least among producers of children's garments, is the onset of a federal ban on three phthalates and interim restrictions on three others. Given that the "ECO" labels are advertised as PVC-free, and PVC frequently contains phthalates as a softener, it seems entirely plausible that Avery-Dennison, as well as their clients, are moving rapidly to ensure they stay in compliance with the evolving regulations in this area, and that the tags that have been used by Carter's and other brands up to this point have contained them. Phthalates are the suspected chemical of concern logged in ZRecs Guide listings of Carter's infant apparel on September 28, 2008.

Interestingly, Öko-Tex certified materials are guaranteed to be free of even more things not mentioned in Avery's marketing materials, but equally relevant to the potential problems with Carter's Fall 07 clothing: namely, allergy-inducing dyes, pesticides, and preservative phenols. From Wikipedia:

The Öko-Tex label is not only a recognized benchmark for the consumer – it also serves as an additional quality assurance tool for the manufacturer. The concept has become established as a safety standard throughout the textile manufacturing chain and enables checks to be made for any harmful substances at each stage in the production process. The test samples are tested by the independent Öko-Tex institutes for their pH-value, formaldehyde content, the presence of pesticides, extractable heavy metals, chlorinated organic carriers and preservatives such as pentachlorophenol and tetrachlorophenol. The tests also include checks for any MAC amines in azo dyestuffs and allergy-inducing dyestuffs. The use of flame-retardant and biocide finishes is prohibited in the clothing sector. The certificates issued are distributed or allocated in line with the international guidelines and specifications of the Öko-Tex Test Association. [Link]

The company response

When injury reports began surfacing in November 2007, company representatives fell back on Carter's standard policy of accepting returns directly from consumers who had any complaints about a product that could not be resolved by other means. This strategy has guided their response as the problem has grown in scope over the subsequent year, and remains as the recourse they provide to consumers. Casey stated that the company contacted the Consumer Products Safety Commission about the issue after receiving "some portion of 10 complaints," and kept in close contact with them as the number of cases increased. Almost a year later, on October 24, 2008 the company released an advisory through the CPSC for the Fall 07 line and added a page about the issue to their company website. By that time they had been contacted by approximately 400 consumers about the issue.

Casey described the process of classifying the condition by showing photographs to physicians. "The first physician we showed the photographs to, he took one look at them and said, 'That's contact dermatitis,'" Casey said. "It wasn't even the kind of thing he had to look up."

Casey confirmed that the company has lab tested not only a variety of sample garments from their Fall 2007 line, but multiple samples received from parents whose children had suffered irritation. "There was nothing in that label we could identify that could cause that kind of reaction," he said, "which led us to conclude that this is a rare allergic reaction in some babies with highly sensitive skin." He noted that families of multiple children, including one with triplets, reported irritation by some but not all of their infants from the same clothing.

He estimated that the company has been contacted by roughly 800 consumers regarding the issue, although some of them were calling without an actual medical case (i.e. they had purchased but not yet used the garments, or were calling for information or return although their children had not had a reaction). We discussed the CPSC advisory and I mentioned some consumers' call for a recall. "Since we launched, the level of inquiries on this... even now, has not been significant in terms of its relation to the total number of our garments," he said. "It is some fraction of 1% of the garments from the Fall 07 line."

The difference between contact dermatitis and a "chemical burn," as many parents (and Z Recommends) had reported as a possible characterization of the wounds, appears not to be one of degree, but of universality of effect. "A chemical burn is something that would affect virtually all people in the same way," Casey said. Something that prompts a reaction in a small subset of individuals, "even the more extreme cases" - i.e. those with seepage, blistering, and persistent effects - are still properly classified as contact dermatitis. I consented to this but observed that the reason the term had been used was because dermatitis is typically associated with something less severe, and parents were grasping for terminology that better communicated the degree of harm. Carter's representatives asked us to stress that the company relied on physicians to make these assessments.

The road ahead

Casey affirmed that Carter's is confident of the safety of its current label formulation, and the switch for the Spring 09 line does suggest to us that the newest Carter's garments, when available, will be far less likely to trigger an allergic response. We will post an image of the label style or other identifying features of these clothes on Z Recommends as soon as we have them. Casey also apologized for the problems the Fall 07 labels had caused for consumers and emphasized the aggressiveness of the company's return program and their decision to issue an advisory, which "has helped bring in a lot of calls" from parents who may not have known what was causing the irritation.

"This has been a major focus of a lot of good people inside and outside this company, and we're very sorry for the problems some of our customers have had. We intend to continue to work very hard to regain the trust of people who have had this disappointing experience with Carter's products."

I'd like to close by revisiting the four points we made about this evolving case in our last big bundle of fresh reporting on the Carter's situation. In that piece I observed that there were four major areas we weren't satisfied were conclusively addressed. In brief, they were:

1. The problematic nature of estimating the number of cases from the number of reports;


2. the nature and characterization of injuries;


3. the scope of the problem in Carter's product line (beyond Fall 07); and


4. the potential implication of other companies in this problem.

As journalists, we believe that item #1 is still a nagging issue. Estimating how many children are affected by this based on how many have reported in to Carter's or the CPSC or both is very messy. I don't think we have a complete picture on this and don't know how or when we'll have one.

Our data for items #3 and 4 is still highly anecdotal; we have received a few reports of problems with Carter's later lines, and regarding items from other brands, but we rarely know if children may have been previously exposed to Carter's Fall 07 items prior to other exposures, or what the relative levels of problems with these other item types are.

Item #2 was, I believe, a misuse of technical terms in an attempt to describe the seriousness of a problem; the fact may be that we (and others) just needed a wake-up call regarding how broad a range of effects and levels of suffering the term "contact dermatitis" encompasses. The fact that such skin irritation can lead to other problems (including a staph infection and hospitalization, in the case of Ava Kunze) do not seem to affect this strict technical classification. Z Recommends apologizes for the error.

Have Carter's items you'd like to return?

The company's refund program is open to parents with Carter's infant clothing from any season, new or used. Call Carter's at 1-888-282-4674 and they will send you postage-paid packaging based on the number of items you have to return.

Casey estimated that customers who could provide receipts could get a refund within a week. "Then, it's a very simple process," he said, "but nobody keeps receipts for a year." Without a receipt, company representatives had to look up the specific items to "research what the highest price paid for the garments was," which he described as a still-straightforward process but one requiring more time. He stated that returns "should be" processed within two weeks without a receipt. (Our presumption is that this means two weeks from the point when the company has received the garments from the customer, leading up to the mailing of a check; factor in the shipping cycles and I suspect you're looking at a total time of about a month to get your reimbursement.

We also encourage consumers who have experienced problems to continue reporting these cases to the CPSC so the agency can have the best possible understanding of the scope of the issue. They can be reached at 800-638-2772 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET Monday through Friday.

Additionally, if you receive a reimbursement that is not as much as you expected or believe you are owed (as some readers have reported in comments on this blog), we encourage you to call the company back to ask them to address it. If the customer service department can't satisfy you, Michael Casey expressed an interest in our interview in having calls escalated to his office if necessary to ensure any problems are resolved.

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It's common for TV news desks to scoop up a story developed by bloggers and claim that they're the first on it - heck, they do it to newspapers all the time. (They also like to reference background sources as "Internet blogs" rather than naming any.) But NBC's L.A. affiliate has been going above and beyond with the Carter's tagless story. From a report today on KNBC's website:

The Kunze family says their daughter's rash first appeared when their daughter Ava was just six weeks old. It lasted for five months. They say, "We saw the first NBC investigative piece and that's when we had the 'ah-ha' moment correlating this injury to Carter's tag-less."

The pitcher version of this story will air tomorrow (Thursday) night, and we'll be pretty interested to see what plaudits KNBC's Investigative Team actually has on tape from Janet Kunze and her husband John. (How do multiple people provide a quote? Speaking in unison?) Janet Kunze's own blog, which she launched in October to help raise awareness about the issue, tells her own story at the foot of every page. It reads, in part:

Last month (September 2008), I was perusing through the Internet and discovered several blogs on babies being affected by Carters tagless clothing. This ah-ha! moment brought to light the months of unanswered questions to my daughter's wound -- it was the Carters tagless clothes she wore that caused it.

We first reported on the Carter's issue on Z Recommends on Sept. 3. Kunze was kind enough to credit a couple of blogs, including ours, for helping her first identify the source of her daughter Ava's rash, which led to a staph infection and hospitalization.

The consciousness-raising of Lindsey Webb, who has joined a class-action lawsuit against Carter's, was also attributed by KNBC's Ana Garcia to... KNBC's Ana Garcia. I think Ana Garcia is angling for a raise.

The only info we're aware of that KNBC has aired from Carter's to date is the pre-advisory statement the company drafted at our request, and which we published on Sept. 12.

We're currently saving the results of an FOIA request to the CPSC for a rainy day, and we have a phone interview scheduled with Carter's CEO Michael Casey tomorrow, which we'll write up for Friday publication.

Hey, we aren't bitter. We'll keep belting them out, and they can keep running the bases.