How the New Tariffs Will Affect LIVSN and Our Customers
On April 2, 2025, the Trump Administration announced a 46% tariff on all goods imported from Vietnam, the country where most of our products are made.
While we wait until the policies are final, we have been talking with our board, our advisors, our suppliers, and other brands to get a well-rounded perspective on the situation. Our goal is to have a measured, rational response as opposed to a kneejerk reaction. If the tariffs stand at 46%, or really any amount, we’ll have to raise prices to some degree. How much depends on our partnership with our suppliers and how much we can absorb before passing it on.
We’re proud to make all LIVSN cut & sew products with our partners in Vietnam, partners who took a risk on us years ago to make our company possible. These suppliers have access to various quality materials, a robust collection of equipment, a skilled workforce, and pay a local living wage.
Why not just move production to the USA? Many of the qualities of our suppliers listed above are often not true of American apparel manufacturing. We’ve been working for years to make American manufacturing make sense for our products and our customers. We are constantly on the lookout for domestic opportunities, but we simply haven’t been able to find a manufacturer in the USA that can meet our standards of quality, performance, labor practices, and environmental impact. I wish these tariffs would change that, as promised.
However, these tariffs won’t magically enable costly development on American soil. In fact, it puts a damper on our current efforts to do so. Changing supply chains is incredibly difficult and expensive, and these tariffs won’t leave us in a position to be able to spend resources developing or supporting new supply chains. They will put strain on our relationships with our partners, will increase our cost of goods, and ultimately will raise the price of our products.
If you’ve spent any time with us, a recurring theme has been improving transparency with you. Transparency to our internal policies, transparency of our environmental metrics, transparency in our design process, and relevant to this post, in our pricing.
If we do have to raise prices, we want to be as transparent as possible about the decisions we’re making. Your support is truly invaluable to us, and we could not do any of this without you.
We live in uncertain times, and that uncertainty can be unsettling. If you take anything from reading this, I hope it is the belief in your own resiliency. Now is a better time than ever to go outside. Own less. Live More.
