If your jewellery fails a lead, cadmium or nickel test at the border, the shipment is normally detained and cannot be sold. You then pay to destroy it, ship it back or, in a few cases, fix it, and the authority may record the product publicly. In most markets the importer of record is legally responsible, so the cost lands on you even though the goods were made in Rajkot.
Customs and market surveillance authorities do not test every parcel. They select shipments by risk, by product type and by country of origin, and jewellery is a known risk category. One failure often leads to closer checks on your later shipments.
What the authorities can do
- Hold the goods while a sample is sent to a lab, which adds storage and demurrage charges.
- Refuse entry and order the goods to be destroyed under supervision or re-exported.
- Publish a notice. In the EU, unsafe products are listed on the Safety Gate alert system, which retailers and journalists read.
- Order a recall if the goods have already reached shops or customers.
- Issue fines or, for repeated or serious cases, start enforcement action against the importer.
Who pays
The importer pays for detention, testing, destruction or return freight. You can try to recover these costs from the supplier, but only if your purchase order and contract say clearly which limits the goods must meet and who pays if they do not. Without that clause, most small workshops will not accept the loss, and recovering money across borders is slow.
Children's jewellery is the most serious case. Lead and cadmium limits for products aimed at children are strict in both the US and the EU, and a failure can lead to a recall that costs far more than the goods.
Why failures happen
Most failures trace back to materials, not workmanship. Lead can come from some brass alloys, solder or cheap zinc alloy castings. Nickel usually comes from the plating underlayer. Cadmium can appear in solder and some low-grade alloys. A workshop that changed its metal supplier between the sample and the bulk order can fail a test that the sample passed.
Read more on the common issues in quality problems in imitation jewellery.
How to avoid it
- Write the limits for your market into the purchase order, with the test method.
- Test samples drawn from the bulk lot, not only the pre-production sample.
- Keep the test reports filed by style and lot so you can answer an authority quickly.
- Agree in writing who pays for testing, detention and replacement if the goods fail.
What this means for a buyer
Treat a border failure as a planning problem, not bad luck. The checks that prevent it cost far less than one detained shipment. Creston & Co works for buyers only, for a fixed fee agreed in writing: we visit Rajkot workshops, draw samples from the bulk lot for testing at NABL-accredited labs and supervise packing. Start with a free sourcing review.