Let’s talk tariffs.
We fully understand the intent, which is to bring manufacturing back to the USA. It’s a noble goal. However, the political cycle is shorter than the time it takes to establish manufacturing, develop working relationships, iron out kinks in the process, etc. so it’s a huge gamble to start down that road with the looming risk that things revert in four years (or less). Given that fact, we expect most manufacturers to do what we’re doing, which is to continue the longstanding overseas partnerships we’ve made. We’ll eat as much of the tariffs as we can handle, pass the remainder of the costs onto the consumer, and suffer the reduced demand. Bad deal for us, bad deal for you, bad deal for our suppliers.
The good news is that we maintain a relatively high level of inventory, so we expect a lot of our sales will be on pre-tariff product, thus reducing the need for price increases in the short term. We recently raised our frame price by $100, which is less than a third of what regular inflation should have raised it by since the last increase (five years ago.) That decision had nothing to do with the tariffs, it was just common sense. We expect the only other thing seeing price increases in the near future will be our steel forks, as we see a lot of turnover with them and they are already priced pretty low.