While President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs left much of the home furnishings industry with the herculean task of reimagining supply chains and price structures, there was one sector that the tariffs left untouched: U.S. vintage. Whatever happens with trade policy, dealers who specialize in the category are in a unique position, selling tariff-free goods in a market already flooded with price hikes (and only liable to get worse).
“My theory is that the vintage and used business will probably be thriving in the same way that they were as supply chains were more difficult or expensive during the pandemic,” says David Rosenwasser, the co-CEO of Rarify, a multifaceted platform that sells authenticated domestic vintage furniture as well as importing new goods from brands like Knoll and Carl Hansen & Son. “People will be looking toward the best and newest-looking product—the closest they can get to the new stuff, if they can get a cheaper domestic used version, because it’ll be faster and there will be less volatility. I imagine a boom in used and vintage is coming, if these tariffs continue getting worse.”
It’s a bet that Chairish is making as well. The day the tariffs were announced, the brand posted an image on its Instagram that read “U.S. VINTAGE IS TARIFF FREE. SHOP NOW.” Gregg Brockway, co-founder and CEO of the vintage and antiques marketplace, says the brand is trying to walk a difficult line of acknowledging that the tariffs will greatly impact most retailers, while also messaging that domestic vintage pieces are a savvy solution. “That is an important story to get out to people who are looking to furnish their living spaces so that you can still have a compelling, interesting home, even when things are getting more expensive broadly,” he says.
Like Rosenwasser, Brockway foresees strong comparisons to the economic trends the company saw during Covid. “Whether overseas shipping is hard because the boats are full with other companies’ products, or because there are now enormous tariffs—it’s the same impact,” he says. “People gravitated toward what was more readily available [but] was still stylish.”
While the tariff conversation may seem cut-and-dried for sellers that specialize in U.S. vintage, it’s not so straightforward for all of them. Alec Broughton, the owner of Denver-based vintage restoration and design studio Aulde, points out that while the pieces he sources might be domestic in origin, many materials used to refurbish them are not. “We use a lot of fabrics from Europe—those are not going to be tariff-free,” he says. “We sometimes have a need for more heritage components, like stuffing for old chairs, which might be horsehair or coconut core fiber. Our suppliers for those materials are exclusively based out of the U.K. It’s the same for workshop materials, from work gloves to equipment to paint stripper—all of that is imported. Material costs for those projects are going up, and they’re going to continue to go up.”
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Broughton is choosing to see the challenges presented by the tariffs as a chance to lean into finding American suppliers where he can. For furniture filling, for example, he’s looking to source domestic wool batting, but the supply chains aren’t as readily available. “There’s no sugarcoating it—it’s not easy,” he says. “There is not a lot of infrastructure in this country for domestic manufacturing. It’s going to require us all to be very scrappy, and we’re going to work really hard forging and investing in those relationships for domestic manufacturing. But it’s a shift we’re definitely going to have to make.”
The flipside of domestic vintage being exempt from the new duties is that imported vintage and antiques are decidedly not—a fact that has sent antiques dealers across the country into a tailspin. The tariffs came as an even bigger shock to those dealers than it may have to some manufacturers, as antiques have been exempt from import tariffs for 95 years. Since the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, antiques over 100 years old have entered the country for free—a precedent so strong that former international trade lawyer turned antiques dealer Catherine Tassin de Montaigu has actually created a lobbying effort advocating for the Trump administration to uphold the exemption. “Smoot-Hawley was the most protectionist, nationalist trade bill we’d previously seen and, even under that, antiques were allowed to enter for free,” says Washington, D.C.–based dealer, who predominantly imports pieces from France. “Why should we stop that now?”
For sellers like de Montaigu, the prospect of going from a tariff rate of zero to 20 percent for pieces from the European Union is a monumental leap. (The current tariff is 10 percent; the tax rate on the EU will be revisited after last week’s 90-day pause on additional tariffs, but was originally slated to clock in at 20 percent.) The dealer has canceled the buying trip she had planned for May, unsure of how the landscape will look by then. “When you’re importing antiques, you’re making decisions months out because it takes at least six to eight weeks for pieces to ship,” she explains. “At the moment, I don’t know what the tariffs will be set at in six to eight weeks.”
Margaret Schwartz, the owner of Ridgefield, Connecticut–based Modern Antiquarian, is continuing with a planned buying trip to the U.K. in a few days, having decided to absorb the 10 percent tariff on British imports. “Luckily, I specialize in garden antiques, and England is known for its beautiful gardens, so I’m glad to have that option, but I still have to be mindful of how much I’m sourcing,” she says. One uncertainty that does give her pause: She says there’s some additional concern among imported antiques dealers that tariffs could apply to pieces based on country of origin rather than country of purchase, and customs brokers aren’t immediately sure how to get clarity on that. “I’m just trying to keep my head down and focus on getting the most quality, unique pieces that I can.”
As the larger industry navigates this turbulent time, Broughton is looking at the positive. “There’s a possibility that if we see a lot of foreign imported vintage and antique goods prices raised, we’ll see interest shift toward American vintage pieces—stuff from like the Federal era, the industrial era, the Arts and Crafts era,” he says, pointing to the creative impact of socioeconomic conditions on movements like art deco or brutalism. “It will be really interesting, I think, to see how the interior design industry shifts aesthetically with these economic changes, this tariff turmoil, into a design style that might be different from what we’ve seen before.”
