CE-marking: not the most inter­est­ing sub­ject for a cre­ative entre­pre­neurs, who’d rather spend time on design, mar­ket­ing plans and chal­leng­ing online conversations.

But for any­one who plans to law­fully intro­duce a prod­uct on the EU mar­ket, like we do, CE-marking is of course not an optional sub­ject to tackle.
You sim­ply have to know which norms that your prod­uct must com­ply with, and make sure you take the nec­es­sary steps to met the stan­dard — or you could be fac­ing a costly recall and see your dream dis­ap­pear from the mar­ket faster than you can say ‘hepp’! That is a risk no entre­pre­neur should take.

For Mum­my­Mug™, we started look­ing into this quite some time ago, and I must say that the quest for the answer to the magic CE ques­tion has been long and wind­ing.
It has taken me through erratic google searches, dis­cus­sions with var­i­ous labs, insti­tu­tions and experts; and even some brave attempts to chew my way through dense source texts of EU legislation.

I’ve had dif­fer­ent answers from dif­fer­ent experts and been pointed in all sorts of direc­tions, leav­ing me feel more con­fused each time — and not one step closer to where I had to be: with a well-structured Tech­ni­cal File ready for inspec­tion should some­one ask for it.

In the end, the solu­tion was just around the cor­ner: with fel­low entre­pre­neur Han Zuy­der­wijk who runs the online busi­ness CE-Marking.net from a base in The Hague.

Han  has a really fresh approach to CE-marking that can save every­one in prod­uct devel­op­ment a lot of money: the Do It Your­self CE-Certification.

Han is an expe­ri­enced CE-marking lawyer, who used to work for the Big Estab­lished CE-Marking Lab­o­ra­tory. Over the years, he saw how the CE-marking indus­try cre­ated a kind of mys­tery cloud around the whole CE-marking process, mak­ing clients feel that CE-marking is some­thing very com­pli­cated — which it is.

But what he really did not like, was that the estab­lished lab­o­ra­to­ries all seem to have agreed on a well-kept trade secret: namely giv­ing clients the impres­sion that there is no way around hir­ing the expen­sive The Big Estab­lished CE-Marking Lab­o­ra­tory to get the CE-marking organ­ised. And luck­ily, there cer­tainly is away around that costly process.

Han’s recipe is sim­ple: he starts with stat­ing the sim­ple truth that in almost 90% of the cases, the CE mark­ing reg­u­la­tions allow prod­ucts to be self-certified for CE marking. 

In other words, you can sim­ply do the CE mark­ing your­self. He does not say it is easy, but for a very rea­son­able fee, he does pro­vides a rich resource base, a pro­fes­sional scan and a prac­ti­cal tool­box with tem­plates and check­lists to help you help your­self: to struc­ture your work and process, with every­thing from under­stand­ing the basics of CE mark­ing, map­ping the norms applic­a­ble, make a plan for con­duct and prop­erly doc­u­ment a con­fir­mity assess­ment and set­ting up the nec­es­sary paper­work for your Tech­ni­cal File, that even­tu­ally will result from all this hard work that lies ahead of you.

Because hard work it is: using CE Marking.net is no short­cut. As for so many things that come an entrepreneur’s way, choos­ing for Do-It-Yourself-CE Mark­ing means sim­ply roll up your sleeves, put in the hours and the effort and get it done.

What makes CE Mark­ing dif­fer­ent is that it takes a fresh per­spec­tive to some­thing that seems com­pletely impos­si­ble at first sight. And per­haps even more ben­e­fi­cial is that CE Marking.net empow­ers you to know your game, know your prod­uct and become even sharper for the next prod­uct you hope­fully will develop some­time in the future. Not putting it in the hands of an expen­sive con­sul­tant that will bill you every time you call.

And the ser­vice helps you save up to 80% of the cost you would have had by using a 3rd party.

This, ladies and gen­tle­men, is why CE-Marking.net should be stan­dard included in your entre­prenur­ship toolbox.

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