Founders and CEOs typically use social media to etch a human face onto their brand, forge a personal connection with potential customers, and put some pizzazz into product launches.
With the thundercloud of steep global tariffs looming overhead, though, many business owners have lately turned to TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit to explain the economic havoc those tariffs are poised to wreak on their brands—and in some cases, to search for a path forward.
@antiplasticlady Replying to @Melanie not sure how any retailer is going to stay in business after this 🤷🏻♀️ #trumptariffs #smallbusinessowner ♬ original sound – Beatrice the Anti-Plastic Lady
@antiplasticlady Replying to @Melanie not sure how any retailer is going to stay in business after this 🤷🏻♀️ #trumptariffs #smallbusinessowner ♬ original sound – Beatrice the Anti-Plastic Lady
Replying to @Melanie not sure how any retailer is going to stay in business after this 🤷🏻♀️ #trumptariffs #smallbusinessowner
“I wanted to make a video about tariffs and how it impacted my small business because I have continued to see incomplete information being shared online—and in legacy print media, too,” says Beatrice Barba, the Bay area-based owner of Tabor Place, which sells nontoxic cups and lunch boxes for kids.
On her personal TikTok account, where she’s built a healthy following under the handle Antiplastic Lady, Barba addressed customers and fans directly last Friday about the new financial reality. Without mincing words, she detailed how Trump’s then-54%, now-104% tariff on Chinese imports stands to completely wipe out her profit margin.
As the owner mentions in her TikTok, Tabor Place manufactures sippy cups and the like out of borosilicate glass, the same durable, nontoxic material used in Pyrex. She sources it from China, not for the region’s low pricing or out of convenience, but because she simply cannot find borosilicate glass in the U.S., having searched some 80 domestic manufacturers since starting the business in 2018, with none of them panning out.
Barba’s video quickly amassed over 600k views on TikTok, where she says the response has been mostly positive—with thousands of commenters surprised to learn the harsh math of the tariffs’ impact from a nontheoretical example.
Elsewhere on the platform, Heather Pavone took a different tact.
@haley_pavone I wish this was even remotely exaggerated. Small business owners are so. Freakin. Tired. #entreprenuer #smallbusiness #tradewar #founder #businessnews #usa #government ♬ original sound – Haley Pavone
@haley_pavone I wish this was even remotely exaggerated. Small business owners are so. Freakin. Tired. #entreprenuer #smallbusiness #tradewar #founder #businessnews #usa #government ♬ original sound – Haley Pavone
I wish this was even remotely exaggerated. Small business owners are so. Freakin. Tired. #entreprenuer #smallbusiness #tradewar #founder #businessnews #usa #government
Last Friday, the Pashion Footwear founder posted a video playfully using the familiar visual vocabulary of a certain flavor of viral TikTok: the single-performer two-hander. In it, she poses as a supplicant trying to coax some relief from an authority figure—also played by the CEO—seated on the other side of an office desk. Pavone comes across like a worker asking her boss for a raise, only the worker is revealed in a caption to represent all small business owners, while the boss represents the U.S. government.
Without anything resembling a Trump impression, Pavone as government avatar smugly steers her adversary toward domestic manufacturing, rather than imports. Each time, Pavone, speaking for her fellow owners, rebuts the suggestion. (“We actually don’t have scaled footwear manufacturing—or, really, apparel manufacturing of any kind—in the U.S.,” she clarifies at one point.) Throughout the video, she makes clear how difficult it would be to ever rebuild sufficient manufacturing infrastructure in the U.S. starting from scratch, not to mention the impossibility of somehow doing so fast enough to survive sky-high import costs from the tariffs.
At no point does the character representing the U.S. government seem moved in the slightest.
The five-and-a-half minute TikTok quickly earned a whopping 3.5 million views. Pavone isn’t the only owner of an apparel company to make such a video this week, though. Over on Instagram, the CEO of denim company 3sixteen posted a comprehensive Reel last Friday about how the tariffs will affect small fashion brands.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by 3sixteen (@3sixteen)
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by 3sixteen (@3sixteen)
Andrew Chen’s video demystifies some of the thornier number-crunching that’s taken place behind the scenes of his business all year. Using the 24% tariff on Japan as an example, he describes how the excess cost of importing fabric from the region will necessarily trickle down to the wholesale and retail levels. “Somebody has to pay the cost,” he concedes. “Either the brand or the retailer and the customer. Probably a combination of them.”
Apart from the increased costs, Chen also describes how the uncertainty around the tariffs will create further upheaval. Trump seems open to negotiating the tariffs on some days; adamant about staying the course on others. This inconsistency creates an environment where any planning for the future involves unreliable guesswork. In the fashion industry, brands presell garments to sellers at certain prices—a process that could become terminally complicated by charging higher-than-agreed-upon prices with the arrival of fresh, unforeseen tariffs.
Chen’s video both explains why the brand’s denim will almost certainly become pricier, and prepares fans for the possibility that, in these volatile circumstances, prices might keep going up. Another apparel brand owner, though, went in an entirely different direction on Instagram.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by MeUndies (@meundies)
A post shared by MeUndies (@meundies)
Although the underwear outfit MeUndies isn’t exactly a small business, it responded as nimbly as newer upstarts by addressing customers directly about the current turbulence. While the tariffs are set to impose a 44% increase in its costs, founder and CEO Jonathan Shokrian’s Sunday Instagram Reel announced that MeUndies is offering customers 44% off all inventory. He delivers the message in a jokey tone, with the occasional expletive, and lots of random cutaways to squawking animals. The short clip speaks candidly about the potential crisis, invites spending at an uncertain time, and maintains the cheeky tone the brand is known for.
“One of the most powerful things about a direct-to-consumer brand is having a relationship with your customers and community,” Shokrian tells Fast Company. “We’re lucky to have a loyal and obsessed community that deeply cares about our brand, product, and values, so when something like tariffs threatens to impact our business in a massive way, we lean in and talk directly to our people.”
Over on Reddit, small business owners have alternately been venting their frustrations and searching for answers.
Multiple lively threads explore the idea of transparency as a bulwark against the inevitably balking at higher prices. But how to disclose the cost relative to the tariffs? On signage? With a tag on the product itself? One thread suggests adding a “Trump Tariff Surcharge (37%)” line item on invoices and receipts. (An idea that may already be catching on.) A lot of the commenters agree on this approach; however, there is some dispute as to whether including Trump’s name will “politicize” the disclosure.
Other, bleaker threads describe more existential dilemmas. Echoing the point Chen from 3sixteen made about the impact of uncertainty, one Redditor who sells imported goods described a Chinese distributor’s plans to stop distributing their products in the U.S., citing that the market had simply become “too difficult to sell in.” Like Tabor Place CEO Barba, the Redditor could not source any suitable domestic alternatives.
Another Redditor with a similar issue solicited suggestions for finding U.S.-based manufacturers, a Hail Mary to avoid higher price tags. The commenters overwhelmingly encouraged this poster to just go ahead and raise prices.
For the time being at least, Barba has not raised prices on her wares. Back in November, anticipating the tariff threats Trump had wielded throughout the election, she shored up supply with a large shipment of product. Since that surplus is already running low, though, the idea of starting to charge her customers more is now on the table.
“I don’t want to raise my prices,” Barba says. “I know how difficult it’s been for so many families recently, so I’m trying to hold out from giving them even more hardship.”
Whether the owners come right out and say it in each case, all the videos radiate resentment for the unprovoked, unnecessary nature of this disruption. They all project an awareness that Trump’s quixotic quest has poorly defined goals and a slim chance of success; that the hoped-for pot of gold at the end of Trump’s wayward rainbow is far from a foregone conclusion.
As Chen says in his video: “Tariffs do not guarantee a return to American manufacturing.”
No comments