For small businesses all around the world, selling their goods in the United States has become a headache-inducing patchwork of new tariffs, customs duties and paperwork. But Anna Worthington has not been deterred.
As the product director of Ruffians, a small chain of British barbershops, Ms. Worthington has forged ahead with plans to sell the company’s grooming products in the United States. This fall, Ruffians started online sales through Nordstrom and Amazon.
“If you want to be a brand and want to make it work, you need to make it work in the U.S.,” she said.
The United States is the first overseas market for Ruffians, and the company is willing to take some financial pain to see its bet succeed. Ms. Worthington said prices on the products, including special holiday gift sets, were being kept so low that the company might not make any profit. But her priority is getting enough sales to persuade Nordstrom to offer the products in its physical stores next year.
President Trump’s tariffs have raised the stakes, she said, and she expects the buyers at Nordstrom to be watching how she handles the tariffs and additional customs requirements. “That risk of uncertainty puts me on an absolute knife edge,” she said. “I could be a huge success — we could be doing literally millions in the U.S. by the end of 2026 — or I could lose it because of the uncertainty of trade tariffs.”
A fifth of Britain’s small businesses export their goods, and among those that do, the United States is the second most popular destination after the European Union. For most of them, the allure of the U.S. consumer market outweighs the trade upheaval.
“Most businesses have continued to sell,” said Michelle Ovens, the chief executive of Small Business Britain. “You don’t want to switch off a big market.”
That strategy continues Americans’ access to British products, but at a cost, most often in the form of higher prices and, sometimes, fewer U.S. jobs.
Although Ruffians is holding down prices, it has made sacrifices elsewhere to absorb the cost of tariffs. For example, the company halted plans to hire salespeople in the United States, including a senior-level executive and at least four other jobs, Ms. Worthington said.
British businesses have a small advantage compared with those in some other countries because their government reached a trade agreement relatively quickly with the Trump administration, setting an additional base-line tariff of 10 percent on almost all goods in May. The British government has continued to negotiate aspects of the arrangement in an effort lower tariffs further, but those negotiations have yet to bear fruit.
British exporters were also swept up by the end of the de minimis exemption in August, which had allowed U.S. consumers to avoid paying customs duties on foreign goods valued at $800 or less and eliminated the need to fill out customs paperwork.
“There’s still a lot of uncertainty,” said Lucy Monks, the director of international affairs at the Federation of Small Businesses, a British trade group. Britain’s trade deal with the United States, she added, “set the framework for discussions to happen further down the track, and we’re still waiting for that further down the track to happen.”
But gaining access to American consumers can be pivotal, making it a prize worth preserving. Ralph Broadbent is a co-founder of Pinter, which makes a machine that lets anyone brew and dispense beer at home, including Guinness and BrewDog pints. Since the company started selling in the United States in early 2024, its sales have grown tenfold, to $2 million a month, he said.
“It really transformed the business in quite a big way — very quickly,” he said.
Eighty percent of Pinter’s sales are in the United States, but Mr. Broadbent said he had no plans to move manufacturing there to ease the cost of tariffs. Instead, those higher costs were being passed on to customers.
For other British businesses, higher sales in the American market offer relief from anxiety at home, where consumer confidence has recently plummeted in anticipation of tax increases.
Dina Jahina, a co-founder of ETO, which makes decanters designed to preserve wine, said she was still prioritizing the United States, particularly for the holiday season, despite huge disruption earlier this year.
The company, which makes its products in China, paused shipments for three and a half months in the spring at the height of the U.S.-Chinese trade war. After the end of the de minimis exemption upset her sales approach, she switched to working with a logistics company to restart the U.S. sales momentum.
“We took the risk and put the majority of our stock in the U.S.,” she said.
Eshe Nelson is a Times reporter based in London, covering economics and business news.
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