Product approvals is a minefield but one that must be successfully navigated to ship product. Every product sold must be tested to ensure it meets the appropriate regulatory standards. Like any type of treacherous terrain, navigating through it successfully requires experience, good judgement and a bit of luck.

Every type of product you can think of falls into one or more categories of international standards. These cover all aspects of the device which can include safety and EMC standards to make sure the device is safe for users to operate in its intended environment. There are also standards for any specific technologies such as radio and wireless protocols or environmental and eco-design.

These requirements are also constantly changing. New standards are often under review are adapted to ever changing needs. It can be a full-time job just to keep up with it all! However, there are some general principles which can be followed to help simplify the process and make it less intimidating for new businesses that haven’t gone through it before:

• Find a similar or competitor’s product to see what standards it was tested to. You can find all the main test standards in the product’s Declaration of Conformance (DoC). Precedence gives you a solid starting point and can help save you a lot of time!
• Assume that ALL requirements apply unless it is clearly stated that there are exemptions for your feature or device. It is easy to trick yourself into thinking that certain standards don’t apply because your product is novel/new/innovative etc. You also need to check any regional variations of standards where some countries bolster the requirements with stricter pass/fail criteria or test conditions.
• The approval process is more complicated and expensive the more customised your product is. For example, if a product connects directly to mains AC voltage there is a lot more to test than if it was connected to a AC-DC power supply. Or if you are using custom chip down designs for features like WiFi or Bluetooth they will require significantly more testing than pre-approved radio modules. These features are often an integral part of your design so it’s important to know the impact that a design decision can have on the product’s approvals in terms of complexity and costs!
• Ensure your product documentation and labelling has sufficient room for all the mandatory safety and compliance logos and information. You’d be surprised at how much trouble stickers and labels can cause (see here for more info on labels). Making labels bigger can often have major knock-on impacts to the product design!

These are just a handful of the things that you can do to make the process easier. If you’d like any help navigating this area for your product please get in touch.