Tariff Update
July 14, 2025
Dear VAE customers, below is a portion of a letter from the most proactively communicative of our suppliers. What they are dealing with all manufacturers/distributors are – they just go the extra mile of spelling it out. We hope to do the same for you.
How the US economy survives this craziness is a very troubling question. We are short staffed but do we dare add a new hire? The end of the 2nd quarter is often bonus season for the staff that worked so incredibly hard making the amazing awards, signs and gifts we sold this past event season. Jessie and I are too worried to do that this year – the extra is held tightly in reserve.
I so wish our American manufacturers had kept their production in the US and had resisted the greed-inspired rush to cheap and fast but they haven’t. Very few iconic “American” products are made here and over time consumers have been lulled into being used to poor quality by the attraction of cheap prices.
We used to ask people if they were looking for an heirloom or a memento – the memento mentality seems to have won – so far.
So just know this – prices are going to continue to go up and the supplier below is NOT using the tariffs as a chance to cash in, as some are. Neither are we. We do plan to survive however.
We so appreciate our customers and your understanding. We buy more and more Vermont and American made products – things where we can control the quality – but they cost more.
Thank you for your business!
An Update About Tariff Impacts
July 8, 2025
When we increased our prices due to tariffs on April 19th this year we were hoping that things would remain more stable after that. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Since our last price increase, there has been 10% more added to tariffs on products from China. There has also been an additional 25% added on some steel and aluminum products that already had a 25% tariff added to them this spring. Reciprocal tariffs on products from countries other than China were also announced in early April at some pretty high levels, but then most of them other than Chinese products were reduced to 10% which has been in effect since mid-April now.
We began to pay these higher tariffs by mid-May on all arriving containers. We have held off on passing on any of these costs for nearly two months now, but unfortunately, we must now increase our prices to cover these cost increases. This new round of price increases will go into effect on July 21st, 2025. We have been in contact with all of our foreign vendors and asked them if there is anything they can do to help us with these new higher costs. We explained to them that higher prices are likely to result in lower volumes of their products being sold. Many of our vendors have sacrificed their margins now in order to help us out. Instead of passing on the full 10% additional tariff increases mentioned above, we have been able to reduce most of the increases to 5-8% instead.
It looks like tariffs are going to continue to change and this week many changes are being announced once again. Unfortunately, they all seem to be going up even more. We will continue to monitor the situation, but if these new even higher tariffs remain in place for a couple more months there will need to be even more price increases to cover these higher costs.
We will continue to accept orders for stock products at the current prices for immediate shipment until the prices change on July 21st, 2025.