A Product Safety Stream

I don’t normally talk about my real world jobs on here. Mostly because a lot of it has to stay secret. I’ve done a huge amount of freelance graphic and web design over the years. It ranges from helping freshly founded new businesses, updating old businesses and an all-round business to business

But occasionally, I’ll get a really strange request. One that doesn’t normally fit with what I normally do.

This event was a Product Safety Award ceremony, hosted by the European commission. Rewards were being handed out based on two specific categories: “Protecting the safety of vulnerable consumer groups” and “Combining safety and new technologies”. These businesses were the handful of winners that had been chosen. Apparently they’d had hundreds of entries. But these ones were the best.

A Curiosity?

I won’t get into details, but it was… interesting to say the least. Honestly, ‘interesting’ isn’t the best way to describe this. If I wasn’t doing anything related to the Product Safety Award, I would have never willingly watched the stream for as long as I did. The show was actually pretty long as well. I can’t imagine having to watch the rehearsal prior, but that was restricted to the big-time media companies.

The whole stream was very COVID-y as well. Everyone stood far away from each other and only a handful of people were actually present. A bare minimum to reduce any potential COVID infections. Probably should have had more microphones though, because everyone was passing the microphones to each other.

At a glance, there wasn’t that much going on. We had an introduction, which explained why this award was a good thing. Then we had the rewards for the first category, split between small and medium companies, and larger companies. There was a small coffee break, and then the same thing happened again for the second category. At the end, we had a questions and answers section, followed by one final reward. The public (well, the people watching the stream) voted on which company they liked the look of best. That was a tad weird, but I suppose it did give people a reason to stick to the end.

There was one thing however that made me somewhat sad.

It wasn’t just the representatives of the winning companies who were present. They also had a panel of judges, who had looked through every entry. These people had seen a lot. What stuck out the most though was when one of the judges spoke about reviewing all these companies. To paraphrase her, she said that it made a pleasant change reviewing for safety rather than the lack of safety. Another judge said something similar, stating that, for once, she was speaking to people who wanted MORE safety, not less. In her tired eyes, she was happy to not have some big company come up to her and ask her to remove safety regulations for a change.

That feeling though made me feel bad for everyone present. The businesses I saw at the reward ceremony had worked hard to prove how their products actually help people. But for each business that wants to protect consumers, there are hundreds who don’t care about consumer safety at all, they just want to make more money.

At the end of the day, it was a bit of an eye-opener. The people present felt passionate about their work, particularly the smaller companies. Their products are designed to increase safety, and they clearly got results. Having seen the work that went into these businesses being nominated was huge. But unfortunately, they were all just a drop in the ocean. Hopefully, with the praise they got and the rewards they won, perhaps other companies might work the same way, forwards more safety, not less. That probably isn’t going to happen, but it’s a nice thought.

One last thing though: the Product Safety Award people really needed some extra music, rather than looping the same track over and over and over again.