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NEW YORK: Sending children back to school in new sneakers, jeans and T-shirts is likely to cost US families significantly more this fall if the bespoke tariffs President Donald Trump put on leading exporters take effect as planned, American industry groups warn.
About 97 percent of the clothes and shoes purchased in the US are imported, predominantly from Asia, the American Apparel & Footwear Association said, citing its most recent data. Walmart, Gap Inc., Lululemon and Nike are a few of the companies that have a majority of their clothing made in Asian countries.
Those same garment-making hubs took a big hit under the president’s plan to punish individual countries for trade imbalances. For all Chinese goods, that meant tariffs of at least 54 percent. He set the import tax rates for Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia at 46 percent and 49 percent, and products from Bangladesh and Indonesia at 37 percent and 32 percent.
Working with foreign factories has kept labor costs down for US companies in the fashion trade, but neither they nor their overseas suppliers are likely to absorb new costs that high. India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka also got slapped with high tariffs so aren’t immediate sourcing alternatives.
“If these tariffs are allowed to persist, ultimately it’s going to make its way to the consumer,” said Steve Lamar, president and CEO of the American Apparel & Footwear Association.
Another trade group, Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, provided estimates of the price increases that could be in store for shoes, noting 99 percent of the pairs sold in the US are imports. Work boots made in China that now retail for $77 would go up to $115, while customers would pay $220 for running shoes made in Vietnam currently priced at $155, the group said.
FDRA President Matt Priest predicted lower-income families and the places they shop would feel the impact most. He said a pair of Chinese-made children’s shoes that cost $26 today will likely carry a $41 price tag by the back-to-school shopping season, according to his group’s calculations.
Preparing for a moving target
The tariffs on the top producers of not only finished fashion but many of the materials used to make footwear and apparel shocked US retailers and brands. Before Trump’s first term, US companies had started to diversify away from China in response to trade tensions as well as human rights and environmental concerns.
They accelerated the pace when he ordered tariffs on Chinese goods in 2018, shifting more production to other countries in Asia. Lululemon said in its latest annual filing that 40 percent of its sportswear last year was manufactured in Vietnam, 17 percent in Cambodia, 11 percent in Sri Lanka, 11 percent in Indonesia and 7 percent in Bangladesh.
Nike, Levi-Strauss, Ralph Lauren, Gap. Inc., Abercrombie & Fitch and VF Corporation, which owns Vans, The North Face and Timberland, also reported a greatly reduced reliance on garment-makers and suppliers in China.
Shoe brand Steve Madden said in November it would reduce imports from China by as much as 45 percent this year due to Trump’s campaign pledge to impose a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese products. The brand said it already had spent several years developing a factory network in Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil.
Industry experts say reviving the American garment industry would be hugely expensive and take years if it were feasible. The number of people working in apparel manufacturing in January 2015 stood at 139,000 and had dwindled to 85,000 by January of this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sri Lanka employs four times as many despite having a population less than one-seventh the size of the US
Along with lacking a skilled and willing workforce, the US does not have domestic sources for the more than 70 materials that go into making a typical shoe, the Footwear Distributors & Retailers of America said in written comments to Trump’s trade representative.
Shoe companies would need to find or set up factories to make cotton laces, eyelets, textile uppers and other components to make finished footwear in the US on a large scale, the group wrote.
“These materials simply do not exist here, and many of these materials have never existed in the U.S,” the organization said.
Price increases may come as a shock
The expected barrage of apparel price increases would follow three decades of stability. Clothes cost US consumers essentially the same in 2024 as they did in 1994, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Economists and industry analysts have attributed the trend to free trade agreements, offshoring to foreign countries where workers are paid much less and heated competition for shoppers among discount retailers and fast-fashion brands like H&M, Zara and Forever 21.
But customers unaccustomed to inflation in the apparel sector and coming off several years of steep rise in the costs of groceries and housing may be extra sensitive to any big jumps in clothing prices. Priest, of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, said he has observed shoppers pulling back on buying shoes since Trump’s return to the White House.
“They’re nervous,” he said. “They’ve obviously been playing the long game as it relates to inflation for a number of years now. And they just don’t have the endurance to absorb higher prices, particularly as they’re inflicted by the US government.”
Winners and losers in a garment trade war
According to a report by British bank Barclays published Friday, the winners in the tariff wars are retailers that have at least one of these attributes: big negotiating power with their suppliers, a strong brand name and limited sourcing in Asia.
In clothing and footwear, that includes off-price retailers Burlington, Ross Stores Inc. and TJX Companies, which operates T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, as well as Ralph Lauren and Dick’s Sporting Goods, according to the report.
The companies in for a tougher time are those with limited negotiating power, limited pricing power and high product exposure in Asia, a list including Gap Inc., Urban Outfitters and American Eagle Outfitters, according to the report.
Secondhand clothing resale site ThredUp cheered a related action Trump took with his latest round of tariffs: eliminating a widely used tax exemption that has allowed millions of low-cost goods — most of them originating in China — to enter the US every day duty-free.
“This policy change will increase the cost of cheaply produced, disposable clothing imported from China, directly impacting the business model that fuels overproduction and environmental degradation,” ThredUp said.
Several industry analysts and economists said they think tariffs will end up being a consumer sales tax that widens the yawning gap between America’s wealthiest residents and those in the middle and lower end of the income spectrum.
“So where will the US be buying its apparel now that the tariff rates on Bangladesh, Vietnam and China are astronomical?” Mary E. Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said of the schedule set to take effect Wednesday. “Will the new ‘Golden Age’ involve knitting our own knickers as well as snapping together our cellphones?”