Tariffs may not have been a kitchen table issue before President Donald Trump made them a central tenet of his campaign, and now, his second term. But Trump’s catch-all strategy for solving America’s economic woes has sowed chaos in recent weeks, sending markets into free fall, souring relationships with trade partners, and perhaps hurting the very members of American industry he’s purportedly advocating for.
Trump’s reasoning for levying duties on China, Mexico, Canada, the European Union and the world at large has varied, but it comes back to one key message: manufacture in the U.S., and you won’t get taxed. “If you don’t make your product in America, however, under the Trump administration, you will pay a tariff and, in some cases, a rather large one,” he’s said.
But according to U.S. manufacturers—the actual boots on the ground—the math isn’t that simple.
From seeing higher prices on essential, foreign-made inputs like buttons and trims to waning goodwill from consumers outside the U.S., loss of business from sectors hit hard by duties and rising prices from offshore suppliers, the impacts of Trump’s tariff plan have been wide-ranging—and most of the proposed duties, China aside, haven’t even gone into effect yet.
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“There’s probably been about a 20-percent increase in interest in domestic production, but it still comes down to dollars and cents. I always say people shop with their wallets, not their patriotism,” Mitch Gambert, CEO and owner of Gambert Shirtmakers in Newark, N.J., told Sourcing Journal.
While brands and retailers are scrambling to identify alternate sourcing in case new tariffs—retaliatory or reciprocal—do take effect, Gambert said interest doesn’t always translate to purchase orders, at least not yet. Longtime partner Nordstrom has indicated a desire to scale up its business with the manufacturer as a means of expanding its close-to-home sourcing, but those talks are ongoing.
“The tariffs are definitely impacting my business more negatively than positively right now as a domestic manufacturer,” Gambert said. The custom and wholesale shirting outfit is running into trouble servicing its existing client base due to the 20-percent duties on China-made goods and threats of duties on Canadian products.
“Buttons are, in essence, a finished product, but they are an essential part of my raw materials,” he explained. “When the first 10 percent was added to the Chinese duties, the Chinese added an additional 8-percent price hike [on buttons], so my prices went up 18 percent.” That’s already translated to a $5,400 increase on each order of 5,000 buttons that the supplier has placed since February.
“Tariffs have never helped me,” Gambert continued. The group sources its woven cotton fabrics from a “jobber” in Canada—an intermediary wholesaler that brings in textiles from across the globe, selling them to manufacturers in right-sized quantities so they don’t have to purchase reams of fabric they don’t need.
“We buy some fabrics that they import from Italy, from South Korea, from China”—a breadth of options Gambert Shirtmakers would not be able to purchase directly on its own. But when Trump began ramping up his tariff talk, the Canadian firm imposed a 33-percent surcharge on all shipments to cover the new duties and shipping costs. The decision forced Gambert to cull 50 fabric options from the company’s portfolio immediately and cancel already-placed orders.
“Tariffs for woven cottons were introduced in the 1800s, and the purpose of the tariffs was to protect American woven mills. Right now, to date, there are like three active woven cotton mills that I could even buy from domestically, and they don’t even support an array of fabrics that I would need for my client base,” he said.
“My frustration with the tariffs is that they’re applied to what we term raw materials, like yarn; we just have no access to American made products. It would be amazing to be able to make a completely vertical American shirt, but it’s just not possible.”
An even more daunting purchase for U.S. manufacturers in 2025 is machinery, much of which is sourced from Asia or Europe. With advanced equipment often costing companies tens of thousands of dollars, a 15-percent, 20-percent or 25-percent duty increase could be cost-prohibitive, not just a headache.
“So I’m the one who gets hit with that. My retail base are the ones who are going to get hit with it, who are then going to pass it on to the consumers,” Gambert said.
Alexa Roberti, director of sales for Rochester, N.Y. custom suiting and apparel company Adrian Jules, also bemoaned the forthcoming price increases that her family-owned business will face on necessary equipment.
“All our machines are coming from Germany or China. I can’t see a U.S. company investing in coming up with a similar sewing machine and doing that within a time frame that would make sense for us to even pivot,” she said.
Some of the group’s machines cost between $50,000 and $200,000. Added duties represent “a huge chunk for us to digest that did not exist a year ago.”
The 70-person operation, which makes men’s and women’s suiting and tailored garments, sells private-label goods to New York City brick-and-mortars and also runs its own custom suiting shops.
According to Roberti, “The tariffs have placed a lot of ambiguity on our business.”
“On the one hand, we’ve had a lot of interest from retailers and boutique stores that don’t currently carry domestic-made products, and they’ve reached out to us or signed up with us because they’re anticipating tariffs that may level the playing field between a domestic suit versus an offshore suit,” she explained. “But on the other hand, we do get certain raw materials like our canvassing from Canada, and fabric we import to make our clothing from Italy. So, we’re also anticipating the cost of our raw materials going up.”
Canvas, she explained, is “the heart of a tailored garment,” sandwiched between a suit’s outer fabric and its lining. “It’s not like we can just say, ‘All right, this canvas has gone up 25 percent, let’s just use something from another country.’ Even if we needed to change our supply strategy, it’s months and months of R & D to make sure that we maintain quality,” she added.
The firm’s European fabric suppliers began raising prices in anticipation of new tariffs back in January.
“For anything we import from Europe, there was pretty much a blanket, ‘We’re raising our prices. This is what they are.’ There’s really no negotiation,” she said, noting that suppliers have tacked on an average of 5 percent to 15 percent. “But when it comes to Canada, who we do some business with, they’ve been more flexible.” Until those partners are sure what the trade landscape will look like, they’re proceeding with business as usual.
“But it’s fast coming,” Roberti said. “We’re going to probably see price increases that we’ll absorb part of, and then we’ll have to have some tough conversations with our customers about increased costs due to the raw materials.”
Adrian Jules is loathe to jack up prices for its retail partners, and is determined to absorb as much of the impact as it can. “We don’t want to affect our customers. We don’t want to have to raise prices,” she stressed.
The tariff turmoil has had some positive impacts for the Rochester manufacturer, though. Roberti said there’s been “a definite pickup in interest from clients or prospects” interested in developing American sourcing options. “I wouldn’t say we’re fielding calls all day, but I would say it’s noticeable. It’s multiple inquiries a week. Some days we’re getting three, four or five inquiries in a day since mid-February,” she added.
Still, it’s hard to count on those probing phone calls as evidence of a real upturn when the trade environment is so volatile that policies change almost daily.
“We just want to know what is going to stick. The hardest part is the uncertainty,” Roberti said. “If [the tariffs] do stick, and there happens to be a continued interest in domestic manufacturing, then I know I should hire some more staff, some more seamstresses and sewers. But if it’s going to be 25 percent this week, and then 10 percent next week, and then no tariffs the week after, it’s really hard to plan.”
The sales director said if Adrian Jules doesn’t get some concrete direction from the administration in the next two to four weeks, “we’ll start really exploring all options to either drive costs down, keep costs the same, or come up with a more solid plan with our clients” to pivot to a new pricing structure.
“Everything’s in a holding pattern right now,” echoed Mitch Cahn, owner and president of Unionwear, a Newark, N.J.-based manufacturer of hats, bags, promotional products and military gear.
While the manufacturer doesn’t rely on imported inputs, the mercurial nature of a market waiting with bated breath for the next tweet from the Oval Office has caused some pullback from clients, including the federal government.
“We have not made sales yet because of the tariffs, and I think uncertainty is a big reason for that,” he said. In fact, “Because of the uncertainty, people are not ordering anything.”
The mostly-B2B business services American companies like auto and appliance makers with promotional products, political campaigns with hats (like the Harris-Walz camo style rolled out during the 2024 presidential race), and U.S. defense agencies with gear and uniforms. But those companies, some of them impacted by tariffs themselves, along with the government, which is facing mass job cuts and a potential shutdown, are watching their balance sheets hawkishly now.
“We have definitely seen a slowdown in orders from these [government] agencies,” he said. “I don’t remember a time where this has happened, ever. I have not seen anything like this, where [the government] is not submitting purchase orders that have happened every year for at least 10 years because they want to hold on to their budgets.”
Unionwear’s business is more tied to the politics and policies of the moment than it has been in years past, even on the commercial side. The group attended a trade show in January for promotional products and saw “300 percent more than our usual number of inquiries at a show we’ve been doing for decades,” Cahn said. “It has to be from the tariffs; there really can’t be much else.”
The tariffs, if they’re expanded and maintained, could have a big impact on a small manufacturing business. But Cahn is dubious that even a sustained, aggressive tariff strategy would prompt companies to move a meaningful portion of their business to the U.S.—especially if the duties are eventually lifted and it becomes cheaper and easier to revert back to old sourcing habits.
“I don’t see companies necessarily investing in domestic manufacturing if they think that all of Trump’s plans are going to get wiped out—if the Democrats retake the House in a tremendous fashion during the midterm elections, for example,” he added. “Four years is not enough, I think, to have a huge impact on domestic textile manufacturing.”
Meanwhile, there are potential impacts that “no one’s talking about yet,” Cahn said. “For example, if the tariffs get up to a point where there’s really a chill in international trade, that’s just going to bring [ocean] shipping costs down, because there’s going to be all this excess capacity in shipping,” he said.
“That’s going to mitigate any of the effect that the tariffs are going to have, if it gets to that point.” Companies facing heightened duties on offshore goods would see savings in logistics costs, and it might still be cheaper to source from Asia than from New Jersey, he pointed out.
“Another thing is that there was really some positive movement towards nearshoring that it’s been happening since the pandemic; this has put an absolute freeze on that,” Cahn added. Who’s going to move their production to Central or South America when a new sourcing locale could “get hit with a tariff like a bolt of lightning tomorrow”?
With a robust co-production chain taking shape in the Western Hemisphere, a slowdown in the closer-to-home sourcing trend would hurt, not help, American producers.
“There is a path for a company like ours to see a net benefit from tariffs,” Cahn said. “But if increasing the tariffs is cutting your nose off to spite your face, that’s not sustainable.”