Viewed through the lens of the furniture industry, the president’s tariff rollout has had a certain irony to it. Tariffs are supposed to benefit American manufacturers, but many furniture makers have given them mixed-to-negative reviews. The big trade associations have actively lobbied against them. And no high-profile furniture executives came out to cheer during the roller-coaster ride of hot tariff summer. It’s a battle fought on behalf of a cause that few people seem to truly believe in.
But that’s the furniture world, where executives flinch before checking the trade news. In the cabinetry world, it’s a different story. There, last week’s announcement of a 50 percent tariff on most imported kitchen and bathroom cabinetry was met in many corners with applause.
The loudest has come from the Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association, which, through its advocacy group, the American Kitchen Cabinet Alliance, has lobbied for trade protections in recent years. Following the latest tariff news, the organization put out a press release stocked with quotes from executives at domestic manufacturers cheering the news, with one saying it could usher in a golden age for the industry.
Their position is simple: Overseas manufacturers—many based in China—are relying on government subsidies to produce cabinetry at below-market rates and sell it in the U.S. at cutthroat pricing (a practice known as “dumping”), threatening the stateside industry. The AKCA says that 250,000 American jobs are at stake.
While government data doesn’t suggest huge recent drop-offs in the domestic industry employment, many insiders fear that, without strong medicine, what happened to the case goods business in the 2000s—rampant offshoring—could happen to cabinetry in the 2020s. And there’s little doubt that imports have made huge inroads in the lower and middle tier of the market over the past decade, squeezing American producers.
“Twelve years ago, I went on a tour of [kitchen] showrooms in the Boston metro area, and every one of those dealers carried an import line, but almost all of them kept it in the back room, and they didn’t talk about it unless they were forced into that conversation,” recalls David Littlefield, CEO of Marsh, a High Point, North Carolina–based cabinetry manufacturer that employs 600. “I did the same trip nine years later, and the imported product was front and center in showrooms.”
These tariffs are not the first time the cabinetry industry has won trade protections. In 2020, after investigating dumping complaints from the AKCA, the government slapped duties—some nearly as high as 270 percent—on Chinese exporters. Shortly thereafter, the domestic industry received another shot in the arm as the pandemic led to an explosion of renovation projects. While overseas competitors struggled with the new duties and Covid supply-chain snarls, U.S. makers enjoyed a modest boom.
But now the pandemic surge is over. Meanwhile, inflation has pushed up costs for American producers, while overseas manufacturers have improved the quality of their product. At the same time, the AKCA contends, these producers have found ways to circumvent antidumping measures by moving production around the globe—hence a push for the wide net of a global category tariff.
The details of the new duties are still emerging, and much hinges on the specifics. Seemingly small measures—like how component pieces are tariffed—could wildly swing the efficacy of the policy. Though the AKCA cheered 50 percent tariffs, originally the organization had pushed for double that. Littlefield is waiting for the finer points to fall into place, but he’s confident that some change is necessary.
“In some cases, [dumping] has eliminated jobs, it’s driven margins down,” he says. “We’ve been here 120 years, and we want to be able to continue to employ 600 people here in High Point. We want to be able to continue to be a good employer, produce a good product, and have fair trade so that the playing field is level. It’s really that simple.”
The tariff news has been cheered by many domestic producers. Yet throughout the broader design industry, it has received a more mixed reaction, as a complicated ecosystem of buyers and sellers grapples with the implications. The National Kitchen & Bath Association put out a release following the tariffs that seemed carefully calibrated not to take sides, with a promise to follow the details and a quote from CEO Bill Darcy referencing overall industry resilience.
Among some designers, there was an immediate panic that a 50 percent tariff would be charged on the millions of dollars of high-end English and other European cabinetry already on the water, blowing up project budgets everywhere. Then, a Monday-night clarification from the White House softened the blow. For one, the implementation of the tariffs is delayed from October 1 to October 14, and the rollout will happen in two stages, starting at 25 percent and creeping up to 50 percent come January 1 of next year. And crucially, the EU and the U.K. will only face duties of 15 and 10 percent, respectively, essentially equaling the region-specific tariffs that were already in place—a relief to many on both sides of the Atlantic.
“[The 15 percent tariff] is, of course, one we would prefer not to pay, but it’s not going to be a dealbreaker,” says Anders Dalskov, the CEO of Danish kitchen design brand Reform. The U.S. is the company’s largest market, and while the gyrations of the president’s trade policy have added an element of unpredictability to its expansion here, Dalskov has no plans to slow down. “It doesn’t change how we look at the attractiveness of the U.S. market at all,” he says. “We want to avoid uncertainty, but it doesn’t change the potential we see for growth.”
For some in the high end of the trade, the news has been greeted with a shrug—just more tariff noise. Many designers already rely on local shops as their primary source for cabinetry. And the general perception is that affluent clients aren’t particularly price-sensitive: Domestic or imported, they want what they want, and new duties will neither help nor hurt in the long run. “My guess is that the benefits will be marginal,” says Scott Hudson, founder of the Seattle-based high-end cabinetry brand Henrybuilt. “We’ll know more in a couple months.”
However, no one is downplaying the likelihood that these tariffs will increase costs, especially in the lower tiers of the market, where builders and first-time homeowners often turn to imported options. Ikea has suggested it will raise U.S. prices on cabinetry, and most are predicting similar hikes across other big-box chains and dealerships.
The news also comes at a particularly fraught time for housing, with affordability at historical lows. The fear among some observers is that these tariffs will exacerbate the cost of new construction and renovation projects, dampening overall demand and perhaps boomeranging around to ding the domestic industry such levies supposedly aim to help.
Certainly, increased costs will trickle to the design trade. Florida interior designer and content creator Galey Alix relies on a brand with some U.S. manufacturing for most of her kitchen projects—a company that will (likely) be exempt from the new tariffs. However, for clients on a budget, she has specified imported ready-to-assemble cabinetry, product that will soon be tariffed at a 50 percent rate.
“I’m a little bit protected because the main manufacturer I work with is domestic, but with lower-budget projects that can’t afford a custom kitchen, that’s where you need to go to premade cabinets and plug-and-play,” says Alix. “What’s scary in that scenario is that the people who are doing that can’t afford the custom kitchen, and they’re going to get hit the hardest. So the people who are already getting sticker shock are the same ones who are going to have to pay more. … [Those clients] might just end up delaying the whole project.”
Like many designers, Alix has been bombarded with tariff announcements from vendors of all stripes in recent months. Her coping mechanism is to focus on what she can control: design choices. If the cost of kitchen cabinetry does shoot up, she’s thinking of ways to mitigate the expense, like doing without custom compartments or eliminating uppers in favor of a more open look.
A familiar refrain in the tariff era: For Alix, the anxiety comes not so much from the prospect of higher prices as it does the uncertainty. “We’re living in no-man’s-land,” she says. “You’re guessing constantly, trying to make moves on your chessboard, but you don’t even know who you’re playing against.”
