Erik Fabian figured his new product would have landed in American kitchens by now. The DoughBed, a suitably warm resting place for flour and yeast on its way to becoming a loaf of sourdough bread, would ideally have been generating positive reviews and cash to finance his business.
Instead, Mr. Fabian, 49, is waiting for a container ship bearing the first DoughBeds from his factory in China to dock at the Port of Houston, about three months later than expected. He is scrambling to secure credit in the face of a cash crunch. Rather than plotting growth strategies for his start-up, Sourhouse, he is consumed with survival.
The reason for his distress is the global trade war championed by President Trump. Months of extraordinary volatility — with tariffs announced, then delayed, then changed — have left Mr. Fabian confused about the basic economics of his business. Like millions of small-business owners dependent on imports, he has grown accustomed to a menu with no palatable options: Pay an expensive tax now, or wait and hope for better while accepting delays.
Mr. Fabian had planned to ship his new product from China in early April. At the time, tariffs on Chinese imports reached 145 percent. So he waited until late May, when the tariffs had been reduced to 30 percent.
His decision pushed the arrival of the DoughBeds from spring — an excellent time to launch a new kitchen product — into summer, a miserable season to introduce a gadget tied to turning on the oven. He has postponed a marketing push until fall.
The delay is especially inopportune because Mr. Fabian is on the hook to satisfy preorders placed via Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform that he has relied on to raise money while generating word-of-mouth for new products.
His campaign on Kickstarter worked as intended, stoking anticipation for the DoughBed. Yet that yielded the worst outcome — customers flocking to his website only to encounter disappointing news: “Sold out.”
“We are losing momentum,” Mr. Fabian complained. “You spent over a year building to this moment of launch. That moment, you can’t really recreate it.”
On a recent morning, he was trying to figure out how to come up with $150,000 to pay the tariffs on his incoming shipments between now and fall. And he was struggling to grasp the purpose of the levies. Nearly all of the products he has manufactured in China are either impossible to find in the United States or available only at triple and quadruple the price.
More than anything, he was nursing a sense of lost opportunity. “Instead of thinking about my future innovations, and creating a spatula or an alarm or baking vessels, I’m thinking about Trump,” he said. “I’m just kind of tied to his whims.”
Mr. Fabian knows how to run a business under trying circumstances. The idea that eventually turned into Sourhouse was born in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A builder of brands, Mr. Fabian had previously worked in marketing at Moleskine, the retailer of high-end notebooks. Suddenly, he was a stay-at-home father, tending to a newborn daughter and a 5-year-old son in a world under lockdown. His family decamped from its Brooklyn apartment to Jacksonville, Fla., to live with Mr. Fabian’s in-laws in their larger home. Mr. Fabian began exploring a business that seemed suited to the times. Amid the isolation and fear, people were taking up baking, many for the first time. They would need some help.
Mr. Fabian had for years been a sourdough baker. He swapped tips with friends and watched YouTube videos. Many bakers complained about the difficulties of nurturing their starter, the living culture of yeast and bacteria used to make a sourdough loaf. Mr. Fabian had been frustrated in his early attempts, stymied, he discovered, by the frigid winter temperatures of his Brooklyn apartment.
Bakers shared improvised solutions, like putting starter in the microwave, or stashing it in warm spots of the kitchen. But none of these approaches were reliable. He began experimenting. The result was a device that could keep sourdough starter at what he came to call the Goldilocks zone: 75 to 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
He conferred with a friend, Jennifer Yoko Olson, an industrial designer in Brooklyn who had worked on products like furniture and Wi-Fi routers. He shared with her his earliest designs for what became their first product — Goldie, a heat pad to hold a jar of starter. Ms. Olson was intrigued. They began spending nights and weekends tinkering.
In May 2022, they had a prototype. By then, Mr. Fabian and his family had moved to Asheville, N.C. His wife, who had previously worked at Kickstarter, counseled them on how to use the platform to raise money. There, they tapped into enthusiasm for cooking-related products.
Their Kickstarter campaign yielded preorders worth more than $100,000, enough to begin making the product. A second effort on another crowdfunding site, Indiegogo, raised $30,000.
They found a network of factories in China that specialized in making products designed by start-ups. That operation, Platform88, was the brainchild of Jacob Rothman, an American living in Shanghai. Mr. Rothman had spent most of his adult life working in China, using factories to make goods for consumers around the globe.
In December 2022, the first Goldie orders shipped out to customers. And by the middle of the next year, Mr. Fabian and Ms. Olson had begun developing the DoughBed.
When he started the business, Mr. Fabian looked for glass producers in the United States to make the jars that sit atop the heat pads. He also tried to find an American source for the muslin fabric he needed for so-called bread blankets, an alternative to stuffing a fresh loaf in a bag.
Every option cost at least four times what was available in China. Using domestic manufacturers was not remotely feasible.
For the world’s largest companies, trade animosities and the disruptions of the pandemic have prompted a reconfiguration of supply chains. Walmart has moved some orders from factories in China to plants in Mexico. Apple has shifted part of the production of the iPhone from China to India.
But smaller businesses lack the resources to undertake such shifts. They are dependent on the availability of contract manufacturers like Platform88.
In recent years, Mr. Rothman has teamed up with factories in India and opened his own plant in Cambodia, setting up alternatives to China. But neither of those countries can yet handle the electronics that go into Sourhouse’s products. Which leaves Mr. Fabian, for better or worse, tethered to China.
This reality, common to small businesses, underscores what many economists describe as a false assumption of the trade war strategy: the notion that factory production can swiftly be forced to return to the United States.
“The U.S. will not be able to rebuild its industrial capability overnight,” said Susan Helper, a supply chain expert at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and a former economic adviser in the Biden and Obama administrations. “Constantly fluctuating tariffs do not provide the certainty needed to make investments that pay off only over several years.”
Mr. Fabian recently attended an event in North Carolina with Kelly Loeffler, the former Republican senator from Georgia who now heads the Small Business Administration. Mr. Fabian approached her, explained his situation and asked if there was anything she could do to relieve small businesses from tariffs.
She listened sympathetically, he said, but offered no solution. “Her only real response was like, ‘Well, have you looked at U.S. options?’” Mr. Fabian recounted. Ms. Loeffler directed him to a list of suppliers on the Small Business Administration’s website, the same sorts of options he had previously explored.
A spokeswoman for the Small Business Administration, Maggie Clemmons, said the Trump administration “is taking historic steps to bring back Made in America,” including incentives in the policy bill that Congress recently passed. “The agency continues to encourage job creators to explore our database, as well as all available options to end their reliance on the Chinese Communist Party,” Ms. Clemmons added.
Faced with higher costs via tariffs, Mr. Fabian recently lifted the prices of his products by 30 percent across the board. He worries that he is testing the limits of his customers. If Mr. Trump again raises tariffs on Chinese imports, that could force him to scrap DoughBed altogether.
“Our whole model is threatened,” he said. “Maybe DoughBed doesn’t survive more than this year, because the cost to sell it is too high.”
Peter S. Goodman is a reporter who covers the global economy. He writes about the intersection of economics and geopolitics, with particular emphasis on the consequences for people and their lives and livelihoods.
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