E&B's fitness balls burst under users for years; 44 burst reports never reached the CPSC

E&B Giftware LLC of Yonkers, New York, through its subsidiary EB Brands, imported and distributed about 3 million exercise balls between 2000 and 2008 under licensed brands including Bally Total Fitness, Everlast, Valeo and Body Fit, sold at department stores and fitness retailers nationwide for $15 to $30. The balls shared a failure mode with every inflatable in the category: inflated past the printed mark, they could rupture and drop the user to the floor.

The first report of a ball bursting reached EB Brands in January 2004. By 2007 the company knew of roughly 25 bursting incidents, 20 of them causing injuries. It did not report to the CPSC until October 2008, when the count stood at 44 incidents and 29 injured consumers. In April 2009 the balls were recalled; by then there were 47 reports of balls bursting, including a fracture. In December 2011 E&B agreed to a $550,000 civil penalty, with $50,000 suspended on condition it institute a compliance program, in a settlement published at 76 FR 79656.

EB Brands' defense, recorded in the settlement, was statistical: bursts were about 0.0015 percent of balls sold, the balls passed every test the company ran, and the injuries matched what happens when people simply fall off exercise equipment. All of that may be true and still beside the point — the reporting obligation triggered on the pattern of reports in 2004, and the settlement's compliance-program condition was the regulator's verdict on how the reports had been handled internally.

$550,000 civil penalty ($50,000 suspended pending a compliance program); April 2009 recall of roughly 3 million exercise balls; 29 consumers hurt in 44 incidents.

Incident reports flowing into customer service were evaluated as product-quality data to be tested away, not as a legal trigger with a 24-hour clock.

A genuinely low failure rate created a false sense that no report was owed, conflating 'defensible in court' with 'no duty to report'.

Four years of accumulated reports — 25 known by 2007 — made the eventual October 2008 filing look like concealment, which is precisely what raised the penalty.

The company had already been through this: an affiliated entity paid a $100,000 CPSC penalty in 2004 over unreported citronella torch candles, so the reporting duty was a known requirement.

The CPSA duty starts when a company holds information reasonably supporting a defect, not when testing proves it. A low incident rate is a penalty argument, never a reason to wait.

E&B paid the penalty and the suspended $50,000 hinged on delivering a compliance program within 20 days, with any CPSA violation in the following two years making it immediately due. The 2004 settlement over 'Money to Burn' citronella torch candles — 47,000 units sold by a subsidiary in 1997 — was a $100,000 penalty; five and a half years later the same company family paid five times as much for exercise balls it had also tested and cleared. The balls themselves stayed on the market under revised warning labels warning against overinflation.