Owner of 10-person Boise business says $346K tariff bill may force layoffs
The founder of a small business in Boise says the Trump administration’s tariffs would make a large portion of its sales unprofitable.
Casey Ames, the owner of Harkla, a company that sells products and educational content for children with special needs, said that he had to pause the shipment of an order already under production in China because the cost to import it has skyrocketed.
“We’ve already put a down payment on it, so they’re going to finish making it, and then they’ll store it for us,” he said. “We just can’t afford to import it right now.”
The shipment was set to arrive in June.
In the meantime, he expects to have to raise prices on about five months’ worth of inventory stored at a warehouse in Boise.
“And then, we’ll basically stop selling our physical products in the U.S. until there’s some resolution or we can find a place to make these products that are priced competitively,” he said.
He said the trade war between America and China has made importing the products his company designs and sells impossible. Ames has 10 employees, including himself. They work from an old one-story house on Broadway Avenue. He runs the business with his wife, who is on maternity leave.
“Prior to the tariffs, we were going to have a record year,” the 34-year-old said. “We had just hired more people, and we were forecasting a really good year, even with the initial Trump tariffs.”
Ames said he’s going to wait it out as long as possible but will have to begin laying off people if the tariffs don’t ease up soon.
Trump said on Wednesday that would pause his reciprocal tariffs on most countries for the next 90 days. But he said the break wouldn’t include China. Instead, Trump announced he would raise tariffs on its exports to 125%.
Ames said his business paid $26,000 in import taxes in 2024. But after President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which combined previously announced import duties with reciprocal tariffs, bringing rates on products made in China to 104%, he estimated his business would have to pay $346,000 in import taxes for the same purchases.
“These tariffs are just crazy expensive for us,” Ames said. “It kind of makes our physical products not viable anymore.”
Harkla’s best selling product, a sensory swing, costs $29 to manufacture, not including shipping, warehousing, insurance, rent, payroll and other costs. With the 104% import duty, the business would pay $30.16 in tariffs on each swing.
The shipment Ames was expecting in June was to include 4,700 swings, requiring $141,752 in tariffs for that product alone.
Trump says the levies will boost domestic manufacturing. But economists warn it could harm the global economy and raise prices for U.S. consumers.
Ames said he’s been looking for months at finding an alternative to China, but nothing so far has been affordable.
“If we manufactured all of our products here in the U.S., which I would love to do and would make my life way easier, our product price would be so expensive that we could not compete in the marketplace,” he said. “We’re already the most expensive product, because we’re the only U.S.-based company selling sensory swings on Amazon. We’ve tried to raise our swing price to over $100 in the past, and sales just drop off a cliff.”
He’s making cuts to help his business scrape by and avoid layoffs, including canceling some of its software subscriptions and reining in advertising.
Ames is also posting on social media about what the tariffs mean for his company, giving users a behind-the-scenes look at how he’s handling the situation and responding to misunderstandings about the realities his business is facing.
This story was originally published April 9, 2025 at 4:53 PM.
