Keen Footwear thought it was safe. A decade ago, long before the trade wars and the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic, the American company anticipated the need to limit its exposure to upheaval in the global economy.
It began abandoning factories in China that had long made its products: rugged sandals and hiking boots. It set up plants in Southeast Asia and India and then another in the Dominican Republic. In June, the company opened its newest factory, in Kentucky, an investment in the proposition now emblazoned on its shoe boxes: “American Built.”
But that branding and the company’s investment in the United States coincide with the reality that Keen, like most modern businesses, depends on access to a global supply chain for parts and raw materials. The company strives to find local suppliers to limit its vulnerability to faraway trouble, but it still moves many components around the globe to assemble its products.
That movement is now subject to an ever-changing assortment of American tariffs. Keen’s strategy to limit its dependence on any single part of the world has not been enough to spare the company from the turbulence caused by President Trump’s trade war.
On a recent morning at its factory just outside Louisville, Ky., the company’s chief operating officer, Hari Perumal, was wrestling with Mr. Trump’s latest salvo: the raising of tariffs on imports from India to 50 percent.
Mr. Perumal was also struggling to understand the details of a recently announced American trade deal with Vietnam, where Keen has a factory. And he was mulling plans to transfer the making of boot uppers from Keen’s factory in Thailand, where the tariff was 20 percent, to the Dominican Republic, where the tariff was 10 percent.
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