Can Small Sustainable Fashion Brands Survive Trump 2.0?
Jasmin Malik Chua
10 min read
Mara Hoffman is glad she got out when she did.
“I remember, the day after the election, being like, ‘Oh my God, thank you that I don’t have to sell a dress or a bikini today,’” the fashion designer said from her home in upstate New York, where she has been meditating on her next steps since the seismic closure of her eponymous brand nearly a year ago. Hoffman doesn’t regret the decision, which many bemoaned as the beginning of the end for independent, sustainable fashion. Spending time with her family and her new puppy, a dachshund named Keanu, she’s more reassured than ever that she did the right thing.
Hoffman still gets a lot of questions about why she ended something that was such a central part of her life for 24 years. The simple answer, she said, is that it was time for that iteration of herself to end. The more nuanced one is that she had grown out of some of the themes of that life, including what she calls the “scarcity story.”
“The money—it was hard,” she said. “It’s hard for independent brands, and then to have to put the sustainability piece on top of all of this. You get to a point where you’re like, ‘Is this my theme song?’ We don’t have enough money. How am I going to do this? Should I take out a loan? Do we get investors? And I felt what that was doing to my system. And I was like, ‘God, I’ve been singing this song for a long time. This can’t be who I am.’”
Hoffman’s song has become a symphony. With their limited capital flows, challenges with customer acquisition and head-on collision with ultra-fast fashion competitors (and sometimes copycats), smaller, ethically focused brands were struggling long before Donald Trump entered the White House for the second time. Now, the market volatility wrought by the current administration, despite the “America First” promise behind the so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, threatens to do them in. That is true even of businesses that manufacture in the United States.
“It’s interesting because 90 percent of our collections are made here in the U.S., and I don’t think people realize that that we’re also affected by the tariffs,” said Shobha Philips, founder of Proclaim, an “earth conscious” Los Angeles-based intimates brand that uses a local cut-and-sew facility and textile mill.
The problem, she said, is that the Tencel and spandex fibers that go into her bras, undies and slip dresses hail from abroad—Asia, specifically—which could result in a significant jump in her fabric costs if Trump’s country-specific “Liberation Day” duties push through in July, when the 90-day pause ends. Philips said it’s difficult to prepare because she doesn’t know what she has to prepare for.
“It’s about time to restock right now, and I’m not pulling the trigger on it,” she said. “Essentially, as a brand, I’m caught in a holding pattern where I’m just waiting to see what happens, and it’s affecting our future planning. This isn’t a time to innovate or invest in R&D. We’re just trying to survive. We’re not able to kind of grow and innovate in the way that I thought we were going to.”
Hoffman was around for Trump 1.0’s first round of Chinese tariffs. Some of her best partners were in China, she said, and the stigma that products from the country are either inferior in quality or otherwise lacking is a misguided one. The factories Mara Hoffman worked with cared about their “waste systems, their dyes, their employees, all the parts to this,” she said. “And I remember that hitting and being like, ‘Oh, your price points are going up, and then you’re competing with companies that are able to keep their prices lower because they’re not making those commitments.’”
Manufacturing in the United States, in the areas where expertise still exists, is also expensive. Is it possible to reshore? Hoffman asked. Yes, it is. Will it be most costly? Absolutely. Are customers willing to pony up? That’s debatable. It’s going to be a few years of upheaval for everybody, she added.
“People just don’t want to pay for it,” said Marci Zaroff, founder and CEO of sustainable clothing and home lifestyle brands such as Yes And, Farm to Home and Seed to Style. At one point, she oversaw a 40,000-square-foot factory in Virginia that was the world’s only producer of turnkey-finished Cradle to Cradle-certified garments. Plenty of big-box retailers came to visit. Few bit.
“A the end of the day, the consumer has been so trained on pricing that to all of a sudden double their prices is just not going to happen,” said Zaroff, who now contracts most of her production to Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, which are looking at 37 percent, 26 percent and 44 percent tariff rates, respectively, if deals aren’t mustered in time. For now, the 10 percent “universal” tariff is still O.K.
“I think a little creeping up of price based on the tariffs overseas is probably a little more manageable,” she said. “But things are changing so fast. And I think the biggest challenge that we have as an industry is the uncertainty, because it makes it very hard to plan and to be strategic. Sustainability is still seen as a little more of a nice-to-have than a must-have as it relates to economic priorities.”
On Jan. 6, Kristen Fanarakis, founder of the made-in-L.A. brand Senzo Tempo, sent an email she hadn’t expected to.
“There’s a saying in financial markets, where I spent my career prior to launching Senza Tempo, that you can’t fight the Fed,” she wrote. “It means you can’t fight forces that are much bigger than you as an individual investor. No matter how great, planned, and executed your idea—the market is bigger than any individual investor. The same can be said for running a small business.”
Fanarakis said she was tired of waiting for a breakthrough—or for customers. It was time to call it quits. She quoted Winston Churchill: “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”
“I do think pricing is part of it,” she said. “Everybody thinks that the $48 American Giant T-shirt is expensive. But I worked at Gap in high school. And if you adjust the $19.50 pocket tee that was made in the U.S. for inflation, that T-shirt would be $48 today.”
Fanarakis said that the problem with Trump’s tariffs is that they haven’t been paired with specific incentives to boost American manufacturing. Elon Musk’s Department of Government of Efficiency, in fact, has defunded some Manufacturing Extension Partnership centers, which provide support to small and mid-sized manufacturers in every state, on the basis that their work no longer aligns with government priorities.
“U.S.-based factories and brands will need government assistance in some form: tax credits, grants, etc., in order to spark a revival,” she said. “We have all been operating at a distinct disadvantage, generally on shoestring budgets, simply trying to survive. The idea that a tariff alone could help turn the tide in U.S. manufacturing—especially for the small and medium-sized firms that dominate the apparel industry—is naive at best.”
Another question is who is going to man these production lines that Trump sees humming away. Even the most automated state-of-the-art facilities will not be able to fully replace the human touch that garment production is reliant on.
“I just don’t see, especially with immigration getting cracked down on too, the labor force being available for our industry at a minimum wage,” Zaroff said. “Parents are trying to get their kids beyond just working in factories. And I think that’s why a lot of manufacturing went offshore. For high-road businesses, it’s almost impossible—not without changing the business model.”
In December, Joshua Katcher closed Brave GentleMan, an ethical and vegan men’s wear brand that he founded in 2010. He wasn’t able to attract the interest of major retailers, which he said was humbling. But he also sees a larger problem with what consumers value.
“We’re seeing an intersection of really difficult conditions where supply chain costs have gone way up, whether it’s materials or labor, and we’re seeing consumer behavior going the opposite, like going down,” he said. “That’s a really dangerous combination for brands that already pay a premium for sustainable, ethical, next-gen, circular, fair labor and wages. For brands that make that part of their bottom line, there isn’t much wiggle room. There isn’t much built in to withstand those kinds of disturbances or fluctuations.”
Katcher was shocked when he heard about Mara Hoffman shuttering. So was everyone else he spoke with. “It sent shock waves,” he said. “And everybody was like, ‘Wow, if she can’t do it, then who can?’ For a brand like ours, the department stores are in trouble. They’re not buying from companies.”
His current gig at the forestry nonprofit Canopy, which helps companies scale deforestation-free innovations, has been instructive, even though there isn’t much overlap between sustainable viscose and the bovine leather alternatives that Brave GentleMan touted.
“I do see the larger conversation around circularity and sustainability and fashion in general as something that has needed serious analysis—economic analysis, supply chain analysis,” Katcher added. “ There’s been a lot of misunderstanding from the investor side about what these companies need. I think that’s something that’s been overlooked—and a missed opportunity for a lot of the bigger companies—as we are seeing all of these smaller companies go under, and it’s a shame to lose them.”
Trump’s policies could cause further shakeups, said Zaroff. With the closure of the de minimis exemption to goods from China, cost-sensitive consumers could turn more to the thrifting and swapping economy. Her advice to small sustainable brands: cut costs everywhere you can just to make it through. This is not the time to be aggressive.
“This is a time to be extremely conservative and anything that’s a nice-to-have right now should just be put on hold,” she said. “I think this is a time to find collaborations and partnerships, because one of the things I’ve always said is one plus one equals 11. We’re collectively and exponentially stronger together than we are apart. So we need to figure out how we can leverage each other’s strengths to keep things moving forward.”
Hoffman also sees fashion as a collaborative effort, but one that requires greater buy-in to overhaul so brands aren’t constantly at the whims of a broken system that is vulnerable to the slightest deviation from the status quo.
“I think it all sort of translates back to the disease we’re in,” she said. “We’re suffering as a species. We can’t be fed enough. The system was built from the very beginning on oppression, on this idea of growth and profit. And that’s why I’m saying, in order to do this right, you have to build a whole new system.”
