Some high-end wood furniture manufacturers have reportedly benefited from tariffs. It is unclear if those benefits outweigh the costs — and whether it’s even enough to bring jobs back to the US.
Gat Caperton remembers a time when most of the wood furniture that was sold in the United States was made in America. He entered the business 30 years ago after purchasing a factory in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, which became Gat Creek.
Years later, most of Caperton’s peers moved their business abroad, but Gat Creek stayed in business.
“People would ask me, what are you really good at?” said Caperton. “I’m a survivor. I could borrow money and not go broke somehow.”
Many Rust Belt communities were hit hard when furniture, among many other industrial sectors, moved to countries like China and Vietnam in the 2000s. To Caperton, and in towns like Berkeley Springs, this phenomenon resulted in “folks in small towns who felt for years like they’d been kind of sent down the river.” Many of them formed the political base that elected Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024.
Since returning to office, Trump has leveraged tariffs and other economic policies in an effort to appeal to people who perceive that globalization left them behind. Although this strategy has often been politically successful, it is less clear that the policies have contributed to their stated economic goals.
That is in part because the policies themselves were implemented so chaotically that their theoretical benefits to domestic manufacturers were overshadowed by uncertainty and indirect costs. But it is also because rebuilding the United States’ industrial base would take years of investment in factory capacity and labor specialization, which tariffs alone are unable to achieve.
“It’s kind of like the boy who cried wolf,” said John Mullin, a professor of economics at Virginia Commonwealth University who has written extensively about the US furniture industry. “It certainly doesn’t foster the good things that you’d expect from protectionism when you create uncertainty.”
Nowadays, only around 10% of furniture sold in the United States is produced domestically. Much of this manufacturing comprises high-end, made-to-order pieces, which makes up the bulk of Gat Creek’s production.
Trump’s tariffs are meant to help reverse that trend, as he made clear in a post on Truth Social in September: “In order to make North Carolina, which has completely lost its furniture business to China, and other Countries, GREAT again, I will be imposing substantial Tariffs on any Country that does not make its furniture in the United States.”
The resulting duties — a 25% tariff on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities and an additional 25% tariff on most upholstered furniture — took effect Oct. 1. The original proclamation also stipulated that those tariffs would increase to 50% and 30% respectively on January 1, but Trump later reversed those planned hikes.
In theory, the tariffs should have presented new opportunities to someone like Caperton, such as expanding production or engaging with retailers that were looking to offset their tariff risk by sourcing furniture made in America. The haphazard nature of these policies, however, made it difficult for Gat Creek and other high-end manufacturers to plan.
“We worried that if folks came to work with us because of tariffs, that when tariffs went away, they would likely go away just as fast as the tariffs did,” said Caperton. “If we’re winning business because there’s a tariff in place, that’s risky business.”
This hesitance is not unique to Gat Creek. Alex Shuford III, the chief executive officer of the Rock House Designer Brands portfolio of high-end furniture stores, operates nine factories in North Carolina, the epicenter of the American furniture industry.
Their footprint means that Shuford’s companies should have benefited from the tariff policies, but instead they had to spend time and energy holding firm amid the chaos.
“The real impacts have been materials inflation, dampened consumer demand, and countless hours of consumed executive time dealing with the ever-changing policy landscape,” said Shuford. This resulted not in investment in domestic production, “but rather paralysis of investment decision making.”
Furthermore, economic competition with Chinese furniture is not the only reason that the US furniture industry is no longer booming. In a public comment for the section 232 investigation into timber and lumber imports, the trade association Furniture for America wrote that a “nationwide shortage of skilled labor” would make it very difficult for domestic furniture production to thrive even if the industrial capacity were in place.
“Workers would be more willing to make their investments in the human capital that they need to be part of the industry if they see that this is going to be a durable environment in which the current state of affairs with the current relative prices are sustained,” said Mullin. The tariff policies, however, have largely had the opposite effect.
Many Americans would likely prefer to buy domestic furniture, but most cannot afford the luxury of buying with their conscience or sense of patriotism. As consumer sentiment sours, worsened by skyrocketing oil prices resulting from the US-Israel war in Iran, increasingly price-sensitive buyers are more likely to opt for imported furniture that is still cheaper even with tariffs. As a result, many retailers and mass-market manufacturers have struggled.
Gat Creek, like many furniture companies, benefited immensely from the home investments that people made in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, in a similar way, Caperton says that he has a great deal of long-term confidence in his factory’s prosperity.
In the short term, though, the economic policies that were ostensibly meant to help a domestic manufacturer like his, in reality, may not have helped at all.
“Our revenues are up and our costs are up,” Caperton said. “Inflation makes it very tough as a producer… We’ve given a lot of benefit back.”