A few weeks ago we conducted an experimental sale of Thinkbaby's BPA Free Feeding Set, one of our favorite children's dish sets on the market, and called it retail advocacy. The model is simple: We host a sale of a limited number of products for a limited window of time, keep our profit margins tight to offer a good deal to consumers, and split the proceeds with a non-profit organization that does good work.

The portion we keep helps us to do the kind of reporting you turn to Z Recommends to provide - honest, thoughtful explorations of what's happening in industry and politics as well as unflinching product reviews, in-depth consumer research, and safety information. For this sale, we decided to do our 50/50 split with the Breast Cancer Fund.

After shipping costs, which were relatively high for this trial sale, we earned $381.84 on about 50 units sold. Half of that is $190.92, which we're thrilled to send to the Breast Cancer Fund on behalf of everyone who chose to purchase a feeding set from us. For us, this is just the first step - as far as we're concerned, it's just a drop in the bucket compared to what we can do as we improve on this system. We've begun outlining ways to streamline the process, to reduce our overhead, and to begin running sales on a more frequent basis, with our previous policies and procedures for publicizing the sale on our blogs in effect.

We've been considering a variety of products for our second sale, trying to select one we think a significant cross-section of ZRecs readers will be interested in and can't easily get at the price we can offer while still offering a fair return on what will be a money-down investment in product. We made up a short list of a dozen or so children's products we knew we could stand behind 100% - we already know the design of these products, inside and out, as well as hundreds (thousands?) of others that just wouldn't make the cut - and started running some numbers.

We knew that in addition to meeting our high expectations for materials safety, the product we selected had to be a great value, easy to package and ship, and an innovative product that commanded attention for all the right reasons. We ruled out some products because of their minimum retail pricing, others because they're for little babies and we think our readership trends towards toddlers. In the end, there was one clear standout - two more of the best products we've seen since we launched Z Recommends and began reviewing products over two years ago, from a company that has been at the forefront of both safer plastics and innovative design for children.

We'll have a firmer date soon on when we'll launch the second ZRecs 50/50 sale, and can't wait to tell you about it, as well as the charity we'll be donating 50% of the proceeds to.

Thanks again to everyone who made our first ZRecs 50/50 sale a success for both ZRecs and the Breast Cancer Fund!