A recall notice tells you what went wrong with one product. It rarely tells you whether the fault is one supplier’s mistake or something that runs through a whole category of toy. Between 3 and 18 August 2026 the ACCC published four separate recalls for silicone pull-string sensory toys made for babies. Four different toys and three suppliers, two of the recalls sharing one supplier and the other two coming from businesses unconnected to it or to each other. Every one of the four notices names the same reason: the Consumer Goods (Toys for Children up to and including 36 Months of Age) Safety Standard 2023.
The fault, printed on the notice
Two things about that fault, and you can check both without any expertise. The string itself has to be short enough that it can’t reach the back of a child’s throat: Nevenka’s notice, for its pull string giraffe toy, puts it plainly — silicone pull strings that are too long and can reach the back of a child's throat causing choking or asphyxiation. And whatever’s fixed to the end of that string has to stay fixed. The same notice adds: the feet on the ends of the silicone pull strings can detach from the product and cause a child to choke if they place them in their mouth.
The Pull String Interactive Toys notice, covering the Dusty and Jimmy styles sold under the Playground brand, describes the same two faults in almost the same words. The Jollybaby sensory toy whale carries only the second half of that: small parts that may detach, with no string-length problem named.
None of the four notices gives a length in millimetres. What they give you instead is a test you don’t need a ruler for: pull the string, pull whatever’s fixed to the end of it, and see what gives.
One of four says it plainly: never tested
Jollybaby’s notice states its reason in one line: the toy was not tested to this standard prior to sale. It had been on sale since 1 January 2025, and stayed on sale until 28 July 2026, six days before the recall notice went up.
The other three notices name a physical fault instead: a string, a foot, a small part, and don’t say whether the toy was tested at all. The Playground pull-string toys carry the longest run of the four: on sale from 14 September 2023 to 12 August 2026, nearly three years, before the recall caught up with them. The same fault, in the same wording, recalled the tentacle toy packed inside that supplier’s Playground Plus Box 4 set — only the tentacle piece, not the rest of the box.
One standard, cited four times
The Consumer Goods (Toys for Children up to and including 36 Months of Age) Safety Standard 2023 is what all four recalls point back to. Made 4 September 2023 and still in force, it applies to anything manufactured, designed, labelled, marketed as playthings for children up to and including 36 months, and its own list of examples names push and pull toys alongside rattles, toy dummies, teethers, and squeeze toys, according to Product Safety Australia’s guidance on it.
Part of how a supplier is meant to check compliance is physical: a small parts cylinder (31 mm in diameter and 57 mm long) is used to check if a small part is likely to be a choking or swallowing hazard. A foot that detaches from a pull string is exactly the kind of part that cylinder is built to catch.
Compliance runs through one of four voluntary standards, among them AS/NZS ISO 8124.1:2023, and the guidance tells suppliers to organise testing through specialist testing laboratories.
Cut the strings, then bin it
If you have one of these toys, all four notices ask for the same unusual thing: stop using it, keep it out of reach, then cut the pull strings and photograph the toy before it goes in the household bin. Only after that does a refund start: email the photo and the order details to the supplier. Jollybaby’s refund goes to oneoneplusau@gmail.com, Nevenka’s through Y Warehouse, and both Living Textiles recalls to info@livingtextiles.com.au, which those two notices put inside 30 days of the email — though the Playground Plus Box 4 refund only covers the value of the tentacle toy inside it, not the rest of the set.
That’s the whole sequence in all four notices: the toy doesn’t go back to anyone. The photograph does.
Not every recall means something broke
Not every August recall came from a fault like this one. The Weet-Bix Wearable Blanket, recalled 20 August 2026, is a compliance recall: the notice says the blankets do not include the required fire hazard warning label under the mandatory standard for children’s nightwear. Nothing in the blanket itself failed — it’s the label that’s missing, not the product underneath it.
The standard the four toys were recalled under doesn’t stop at the age printed on the box you’re holding, either. Product Safety Australia’s own guidance on it says the standard can still apply to a toy commonly recognised as being intended or suitable for children under 36 months of age, whatever age the packaging is marketed at — productsafety.gov.au. The ACCC keeps all of these notices on a running, searchable list of product recalls, and Peeka pulls from the same source.
General information, not medical advice. Chat with your GP or child health nurse.