'Tariffs Will Simply Put Us All Out of Business': Trump's Trade War Is Crushing American Crafters

As President Donald Trump’s tariffs make life less affordable and predictable for Americans, they’re also threatening to make it less creative. American craft stores are struggling to keep up with ever-changing trade policies, which are making the foreign-made products they stock more expensive and difficult to access. Many foreign craft supply companies are now unable to ship to American consumers at all.

Dana Chadwell founded Chattanooga Yarn Company three years ago when she “saw a niche in the local market that wasn’t being filled by the big box stores such as JoAnn, Michael’s, and Hobby Lobby.” She envisioned “a place to find fine yarns for hand knitting and crochet, and a place to build community around yarn crafting.” It’s been a successful venture “in both the business and community aspect” and “I’m truly living my dreams,” Chadwell explains—but tariffs have thrown her shop into a world of uncertainty.

Over 90 percent of her stock has been affected by tariffs, Chadwell says. “Every supplier I have, minus one, from major to minor, has had a price increase,” she continues. “Because the tariff situation has been so unpredictable…it has made long term planning impossible.”

“I feel like I’m stuck in a reactive rather than proactive status,” says Chadwell.

From aluminum knitting needles to printed garment fabric to bottles of oil paint, American crafters work with many materials that are produced abroad. That has left them particularly vulnerable to Trump’s trade war. Imports from Europe currently face tariffs of 15 percent, and while sky-high tariffs on China are paused until mid-November, they still stand at 57.6 percent, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Worse still, Trump is doing away with the de minimis exemption, which allows goods valued at under $800 to enter the U.S. tariff-free. Casual crafters and bustling craft stores alike will see their costs go up.

Chadwell did all of her fall 2025 shopping this past spring—something she says is typical of yarn shops. “Think about how many changes there have been to tariffs since then,” she points out. “It has been extremely chaotic.” With no hope of planning for the long term, she decided to buy more inventory than she typically would in an attempt to lock in “lower, pre-tariff costs.” As a business owner, she doesn’t intend to spend beyond her means—”I opened with no debt and intend to stay that way,” she explains—so she emptied her rainy-day fund “in order to front-load [her] ordering.”

Chadwell has told customers that they can expect higher prices starting this fall. “I simply can’t ‘eat’ the tariffs as a small business,” she says. She’s stopped carrying certain products “due to tariff-based cost increases” and tried to stock lower-priced items “to help my customers keep within their family budgets.” She’s brought in more American-made yarns, but “those are luxury yarns without the tariffs, so they’re a higher priced option.”

Exclusively stocking U.S.-produced materials isn’t an option for most craft stores. “Tariffs impact American-made yarns as well,” pointed out Fibre Space, a yarn store in Alexandria, Virginia. That’s because “American-made goods still rely on materials made in other countries.” Yarn “is an agricultural product,” observes Chadwell, “so certain crops and certain livestock produce the best fiber in very specific climates that aren’t necessarily” found in the United States. Meanwhile, “needles, notions, doodads, [and] bags…can only be produced at much higher prices” here.

Joann craft store, long the first stop for budget-conscious crafters or people hoping to try out a new hobby, closed its doors in May. Many craft shops “have started to try to bring in products at a more affordable price point to serve” those customers, says Abby Glassenberg, co-founder and president of the Craft Industry Alliance, a trade association for craft businesses. “But with the tariffs, that becomes also more difficult, because a lot of those more budget-friendly supplies are made overseas.”

Once the de minimis exemption expires on Friday, even small orders of goods will be subject to country-specific tariffs. “According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, 1.36 billion packages that qualified for the exemption arrived during 2024,” reported Reason‘s Eric Boehm. Several European shippers, including DHL, Britain’s Royal Mail, and France’s La Poste, have announced that they will temporarily pause shipments to the U.S., “citing ambiguous policies and the need to establish brand-new logistics systems,” reported NPR. Danish, Swedish, Italian, and Austrian postal companies have also halted U.S.-bound shipments.

Even before those decisions would have prevented European vendors from selling their products to American crafters, several companies cut off orders to the United States. The popular Danish yarn brand Knitting for Olive announced that it would only ship to American yarn stores—not direct to individual crafters—as a result of U.S. trade policies. The British craft store Wool Warehouse suspended all shipments to the U.S. on August 21. “Clearly this is not something we want to do,” explained the shop, calling U.S. sales “a significant part of our business.” But “the likely average extra charges will be in the region of 50%” per order. The shop anticipated that few customers would be willing to pay that charge upon receipt, leading “to HUGE amounts of undelivered packages being returned to us.”

The “vast majority” of businesses in America’s crafts industry are small businesses, says Glassenberg. Many rely on the de minimis exemption to place small wholesale orders to afford the component parts that go into craft kits and handmade products. “The reality is the supply chain in the U.S. is just not robust enough at this time to be able to provide those items,” she continues.

Some crafters will find ways to adapt. Glassenberg sees increased interest in mending workshops and creative reuse centers, which are secondhand craft supply stores. In online forums about tariffs, knitters and crocheters predict that they’ll weather the trade war by working through their yarn stashes or unraveling previous projects and thrifted sweaters to reuse the material.

Still, those tactics leave out many casual crafters who just want to buy a cheap crochet hook and a skein of acrylic yarn. That might sound like a small thing, but tariffs prevent all sorts of voluntary transactions that shape lives and culture in big—and often inconspicuous—ways. That means shops that won’t be started, gifts that won’t be made by hand, and hobbies that won’t be taken up. And more immediately, tariffs are punishing business owners who want to help Americans fill their lives with more creativity.

“Those of us who are running our shops as a profitable business are deeply concerned but also very frustrated because we feel like we have no control over our fates,” says Chadwell. “There is a point at which tariffs will simply put us all out of business no matter how well we manage our shops.”

The post ‘Tariffs Will Simply Put Us All Out of Business’: Trump’s Trade War Is Crushing American Crafters appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2025/08/28/tariffs-will-simply-put-us-all-out-of-business-trumps-trade-war-is-crushing-american-crafters/