The North Face faced a media firestorm last week after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported that more than 70 styles of shoes advertised as bacteria-killing by the outdoor giant had not been registered with the agency. TNF said it had immediately removed all the hang tags after being alerted but also strongly disagreed that it was selling unregistered product.
The issue resulted in a lawsuit filed last Tuesday by the EPA against VF Outdoor Inc., TNF's parent, that accuses the company of 162 counts based on the allegedly misleading claims. VF Outdoor faces up to $1 million in fines.
“The EPA takes very seriously its responsibility to enforce against companies that sell products with unsubstantiated antimicrobial properties,” said Katherine Taylor, associate director of the Communities and Ecosystems Division in EPA’s Pacific Southwest region. “Unverified public health claims can lead people to believe they are protected from disease-causing organisms when, in fact, they may not be.”
Products that kill or repel bacteria or germs are considered pesticides, and the EPA requires companies to register with the agency, which tests for safety, before products are distributed or sold.
In an interview with Sports Executive Weekly, Steve Rendle, president of TNF and VF Corporation’s Outdoor Americas coalition, stressed that the claims against TNF are not about the actual registration of a pesticide or the safety of TNF footwear, but solely about the “descriptive statement on a hangtag” that the EPA alleges is an infraction of their pesticide registration rules.
“The most important thing is we take our products extremely seriously and specifically our consumer's expectations and how they use our products really seriously,” Rendle told SEW.
After being contacted by the EPA in February 2008 regarding concerns over the description, the hangtags were immediately removed from stores and its website. But VF has since been working to resolve the issue with the EPA in what Rendle said has become an argument over “semantics.” The EPA has taken the position that when a company in its marketing misstates a product attribute, it becomes unregistered. VF claims that there's no law regarding un-registration in such situations.
The matter concerns AgION antimicrobial technology used by many shoe companies in the top sheet of footbeds to control odors. Rendle admitted that TNF made a mistake when it “embellished a little bit” on the product's attribute that was located in small section under the AgION mention on the tag. VF's legal team looked at case histories of similar types of situations and put forth a settlement in that range. But Rendle calls the $1 million in potential in fines “quite far fetched.”
He also called it “regretful” because TNF has a “really strong relationship” with the EPA's Climate Leaders program. “We've interacted with them and collaborate very closely on our sustainability platform,” said Rendle. “But here's another side of the EPA with a very closed mind in trying to help us sort out just what was the infraction and what's the value of that infraction. Quite honestly, it doesn't appear to us to be a national media event where you put a headline out like they have.”
