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ISPA's Pat Martin to retire

Work helped lead to new FR standard

David Perry -- Furniture Today, December 8, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — As she looks back on a career that spanned almost three decades in the bedding industry, Pat Martin says she’s proud to have worked with an industry that took a proactive position on public safety issues.

Her work, said her colleagues at the International Sleep Products Assn., helped lead to the development of a national open flame mattress standard, due to take effect next summer.

Martin, retiring from ISPA next month, said the industry’s approach “made collaboration with regulators and the safety community so much easier and contributed to a standard that the industry can live with and that will save lives at the same time.”

Said ISPA President Dick Doyle: “There is no doubt in my mind that we would not have achieved the very positive outcome that we did with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission open flame standard without the expertise and persistence of Pat.”

Martin is vice president of research and statistics at ISPA and executive director of ISPA’s Sleep Products Safety Council, a group that played a key role in the development of the flammability standard.

ISPA officials said she was instrumental in helping to establish the Sleep Products Safety Council in 1986. That group’s mission is to provide consumer safety information, support research, and promote activities aimed at reducing hazards associated with sleep products.

One of SPSC’s innovations was creating hangtags with consumer safety information. Producers buy the tags from the SPSC and voluntarily attach them to mattresses.

Martin’s “tireless efforts” to promote that project helped SPSC sell more than 220 million hangtags over the past 20 years, ISPA said. That helped raise funds for research conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, research that helped lead to a national FR standard that is practical for the industry to meet, according to ISPA.

Martin has also worked on ISPA’s Flammability SHOPtalk series sponsored jointly by the SPSC and ISPA. And she has worked on a new project targeted at helping to simplify the cigarette-ignition standard issued in the 1970s, ISPA said.

In addition to her work in the FR arena, Martin managed ISPA’s statistics program. She helped to streamline the data analysis process so that ISPA’s annual report on industry sales and trends can be published in a more timely manner, and also helped to develop ISPA’s monthly Bedding Barometer, which provides industry sales data on a monthly basis.

Martin said she was responding to “the growing need for more accurate, timely and detailed statistical data,” a trend that stemmed from a number of factors, including an increase in the number of public companies, “the decline in innerspring shipments, the impact of imports, and the public’s growing interest in non-innerspring products.”

Martin said she “never would have imagined that so much emphasis would be placed on our statistical reports nor that ISPA would begin to reach out to the investment community through quarterly press releases and plan a workshop for industry investors/analysts,” which is tentatively scheduled for early May in New York.

A successor to Martin has not been named.

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Martin retiring from ISPA

Jan 14, 2007

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