We're selling 50 Thinkbaby BPA Free Feeding Sets (or 50 orders for them), for the standard retail price of $40, but with free FedEx shipping to your door anywhere in the U.S. We'll keep 50% of the profits to support our work, and donate the other 50% to the Breast Cancer Fund, a non-profit organization that identifies and advocates for the elimination of environmental and other preventable causes of cancer.

This six-piece feeding set is, hands-down, one of the best products we saw in 2008, and one Z uses every day. (You can read our review of the set or Thinkbaby's detailed product info for more on this great tableware set.) Equally important to us is the fact that we trust the company's extensive product testing, which goes well above and beyond regulatory requirements, as well as their integrity and their commitment to staying on the leading edge of product safety. Products like these - ones we can recommend as "nearly perfect" and recommend without reservation - are, quite frankly, the only kind we want to sell at all.

If you've priced this product elsewhere you'll know that unless you have a local source at a brick-and-mortar retailer, you can't beat this deal. If you want one, we encourage you to buy now, before we run out. Then come back and read on for a lot more detail about how we're going about this and what it means for ZRecs.

Why we're doing this

If you've been reading Z Recommends for long, you're bound to have figured out two things: We value the independence of our product reviewing very highly (we never have and never will receive payment for reviewing a product), and we rarely find a product we think is nearly perfect. We also try to do our part to make a difference in consumer issues that impact all of us as parents - your right to information about the products and materials your child is exposed to, and your right to purchase goods from independent craftspeople whose materials and methods you trust. We believe in advocacy blogging as well as independent product reviewing. But we're ready to do more - both in finding ways to support the research and advocacy we do on Z Recommends and with the ZRecs Guide, and to directly support others who share our goals.

To that end, we're taking a first, careful step into the realm of what we'll call, for lack of a better term, advocacy-based retail. The way we've set this sale up is a dry run for a model we'll tweak as needed, if we decide to do more of this in the future.

What this means for ZRecs

Can an advocacy-based sales model work? We announced this sale in our ZRecs Newsletter yesterday (the full newsletter is now archived here) and had a dozen sales that day. Our profit will be small, but that's what allows us to offer readers a good deal while contributing meaningfully to a cause we and our core readership believe in.

Our goal after this sale is to refine this model for future use - always (and only) selling the rare items we have previously reviewed and can recommend without reservation, and only when we can bring readers a great deal in addition to the charitable donation we'll put up in every instance. In the meantime, we''ll also develop an even more stringent version of our network policies that will ensure readers know how we do what we do, and why.

Future product sales could take a variety of forms - short-term promotional sales of individual products, permanent sale links in the ZRecs Guide, or something else entirely. But whatever form it takes, you will never see the variations in product quality you see in traditional retail, nor the range of options. Our shortlist for potential products to try selling next includes three items, total, from the array of thousands of products we have reviewed, handled at trade shows, or researched online, and our sale of any of them will depend on our ability to negotiate favorable deals with manufacturers. We also have a shortlist of causes we'd like to include in our program, all aimed at improving the health and safety of children throughout the world.

We also have plans to begin donating a significant share of proceeds from the commissions we earn on sales of products through the ZRecs Guide to charity as well. More on that soon.

That's a lot of information about where we're going with this, more than some of you probably need, but this is an important move for us and we want our core readership - people who trust us and believe in what we're doing - to understand where we're coming from, and what our vision for this looks like.

Want in?

For this initial sale, we're planning a limit of 50 sales as we test our system, although this number isn't set in stone. We'll post again here on this topic when we've reached our quota or otherwise decide to cut off sales. With 12 of them gone already, we're guessing this offer will be available for under a week.

So whether you want to help out ZRecs and the Breast Cancer Fund in one fell swoop and signal to us that we should move forward responsibly along this path, or just want to take advantage of an awesome deal on a great kids' feeding set, we encourage you to take a look at some product shots of the feeding set and a rundown of everything that's included, and a nice "Buy Now" button. Payments are processed through PayPal, which can securely process your payment using any major credit card, with no PayPal account needed.