1.1 HOME AUTHORITY PRINCIPLE
The law on gift pack labelling is governed by several statutes, principally
the Weights & Measures (Quantity and Abbreviation of Units) Regulations 1987
and the Cosmetic Products (Safety) Regulations 1996. Like most regulations, they
are subject to differing interpretations. The task of enforcing the regulations
falls on local trading standards officers.
Where chains of shops are involved, trading standards officers take their
lead from the trading standards authority in which the head office of the chain
resides. For The Body Shop, this is West Sussex Trading Standards. In trading
standards jargon, they are the home authority.
The home authority principle has no legal force. Rather it is a gentlemen’s
agreement between trading standards officers that ensures a uniform approach
towards a single chain of shops and reduces
the duplication of effort that would
arise if each trading standards authority separately adjudicated on the branches
within their jurisdiction.
Nevertheless, it is still open to any local trading standards officer to take
a different line. For instance, some Body Shops have been told that contents or
ingredients labels aren’t needed.
The Gift Factory is situated in Leicestershire, so we cannot talk directly to
West Sussex. We have instead liaised with our local trading standards office and
our labels are therefore designed to comply with the requirements of
Leicestershire Trading Standards – in all but the following respect. There are
minimum legal type sizes for quantity and volume/weight declarations. The
restrictions imposed by putting so much data on a realistically sized label mean
that the quantity and volume/weight declarations on Gift Factory labels are
fractionally less than 2mm high. This is below the
.
Those sizes are fully described at the foot of this page.
3.2 INSTALLATION
The software comes on 6 x 3.5" disks. It’s designed to work on any PC
that’s running Windows 95 or later versions of Windows. It should print labels
on most laser or bubble jet printers, but the legibility of small text may be
less good with a cheaper printer. The disk space and memory requirements are so
small that, if you are already running Windows 95 successfully, you should have
no difficulty running the labelling software.
Switch on your PC and start Windows 95. Insert Disk 1 into your floppy disk
drive. Click the START button, select RUN and type "a:setup"
in the OPEN box. Click OK and installation begins. (If you inserted your
disk into a drive other than A, you should type that drive’s identification
number followed by ":setup" before selecting the OK button.)
Follow the on-screen instructions and insert Disks 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 when
directed. Unless you have a good reason for selecting other options, you would
be wise to go with those prompted by the installation process. Installation
takes roughly five minutes and places program and database files within a folder
called LabMan98 which is a subdirectory of your Program Files folder. A start-up
program icon called LABMAN98 will be placed on the Windows desktop.
Double click the LABMAN98 desktop icon to get started.
