In the hot potato game of tariffs, brands that import goods from India are the ones that find themselves under pressure right now.
Last week, President Donald Trump — with little warning — announced that he would be increasing tariffs on India to 50%, as part of a push to curtail the counattempt’s purchase of Russian oil. The tariffs are set to go into effect Aug. 27, and would be one of the highest tariff rates the U.S. has imposed on a particular counattempt, after tariffs on China imports obtained lowered to 30%.
In turn, Bearaby — a startup that sells weighted blankets — posted a message on its website on Friday and sent an email to customers notifying them that it would be stopping production of its blankets, all of which are built in India. “Becautilize of sudden 50% tariffs, we’ve had to stop production of our blankets – something we never imagined having to do,” the message read. “Some favorites are already gone, and we don’t know when, or if, we’ll be able to create them again.”
In an interview with Modern Retail, Bearaby founder Kathrin Hamm clarified that the company would only be paapplying production of its blankets for the U.S. Bearaby launched in Germany last fall, and Hamm stated the company would continue manufacturing products for Europe. Bearaby also sells other products, like bamboo sheets, but is known for its weighted blankets.
Bearaby is just one of many startups having to create hard choices right now. The Trump administration has pursued a whiplash tariff policy — threatening sky-high tariffs only to lower them or push them back weeks later — leaving brands scrambling to adjust to the latest alter in policy. Many brands have spent the past few months raising prices, rushing to receive in inventory before the next tariff alter or viewing into partnering with new manufacturers in other countries.
But Bearaby is an especially difficult position. As Hamm explained, Bearaby’s blankets are hand-knit; it takes two to three hours to create one blanket. “Just to have people in that skillset, it takes many months to train people,” Hamm stated, which creates building supply chain redundancies particularly challenging for Bearaby.
It also couldn’t come at a worse time for Bearaby. The company likes to keep four to six months’ worth of inventory on hand, and it typically takes about four weeks for a shipping container to reach the U.S. with Bearaby’s products. August is typically when Bearaby massively increases its inventory load in preparation for the fourth quarter, which is when the brand typically does most of its sales.
But Hamm also didn’t want to raise prices. So, she’s instead opting to pautilize most of the production for her best-selling product. She spent the weekconclude in India, viewing at ways the brand could potentially streamline production, doing trial runs with different types of materials, all in the hopes of finding ways to lower costs.
And she stated for a startup like Bearaby, “when you have a product that is highly manual and not high volume” — at least compared to a giant corporation — “it is harder to neobtainediate.”
So, Hamm has opted to pautilize production for now. But, she declares Bearaby is not going anywhere – “We are diversified enough that we can sustain the paapplying of the U.S. [production]” — and she feels the pautilize gives her more time to evaluate different options.
She’s not sure exactly when she’ll restart. “If the tariffs are going away, then obviously, we would be able to restart production,” she stated. But she wants to have a long-term plan that she feels confident will allow her to navigate the macroeconomic environment for months, not just weeks. A three-week extension of the Aug. 27 deadline, for example, “would not be enough for us to restart production.”
And, she feels like she doesn’t really have any direction on where she should relocate manufacturing to, instead, as any other counattempt could be hit with sky-high tariffs from the U.S. at any minute. “It feels like no matter how diversified you are, you can’t really plan,” she stated.
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