Since the announcement of the new tariffs and the rising prices of goods for US customers, we’ve been inundated with questions regarding why we’re doing this, and what it means for our customers.
The fact is, as a small business the new tariffs have a huge knock on to how we run our business, and after working hard earlier in the year to drop our standard pricing in the US, we’ve now been forced to put them back up again.
Why are our prices rising in the USA?
The newly imposed tariffs make it so that not raising our prices would mean our products are being sold at a loss, which for any company means going out of business and leaving our customers and community able to buy Tree Tent or Giant hammocks, or get the ongoing aftercare that we pride ourselves in giving.
This particular set of tariffs have already started having an effect on small, medium and large scale companies, some of which unfortunately, will not survive the summer.
Why don’t we absorb the USA tariff costs, by raising all prices evenly around the world?
We have chosen to shield our customer from the full extent of these new tariffs for as long as we can. We have increased our prices in the USA, by only a small percentage of the full tariff costs, but we can only afford to subsidise them for a limited time. If tariff levels stay at the current 145%, prices will be rising again within the next few weeks.
The USA already sees a cost benefit when compared to other regions around the world. A Stingray Tree Tent in the USA. is currently priced at $849 USD, while in the UK, it is priced at £849 GBP, which converted to USD works out as $1,123 USD.
Why don’t we manufacture in the US?
We own our own factory in China so we can control quality and manufacturing of our product, but the current large scale outdoors manufacturing market is almost entirely located in the far east, with high grade textile suppliers and hardware manufactures all situated around this area of the world. It’s the reason why so many brands have been able to produce high quality gear for years at a fraction of the price of gear manufactured in the US or the UK.
We’ve looked into US manufacturing in the past, as recently as last year, but as a small business the costs for us would be unattainable and the cost for the customer would be unaffordable. The other issue we ran into was the quoted production time. Our factory team produce a Flite tree tent in 7-days, when we’d enquired about USA manufacturing the turnaround time would be 3 months.
Even with the tariffs imposed, the cost for the customer would still be cheaper with our current set up, with the ugly reality being the low costs enjoyed in the west are due to the cheaper costs of manufacturing in the east, even for a business like Tentsile who pride ourselves on having a highly skilled and well paid factory team.
What if the tariff costs are removed?
If the tariffs reduce to normal levels, our prices get cheaper again. It’s as simple as that.
