Right now, Erica Campbell is trying to figure out what to do about Christmas.
Last year, the small business owner’s online store offered it all: emerald-green and butter-yellow tree ornaments depicting baby Jesus and his earthly parents, baby rompers dotted with tiny illustrations of an infant Jesus in his crib, and, in homage to Campbell’s Catholic faith, a “Mary on the Mantle” kit, replete with activities children can do each day as they wait for baby Jesus to move from Mary’s pregnant belly to a swaddle in a tiny sling.
Usually, planning what products to order for the Advent season is a busy and meaningful time for the mom of three and small business owner in Phoenix. Currently, it’s causing her to lose sleep.
Campbell’s company, Be A Heart, sells Christian-inspired products meant to provide “small reminders of God’s presence” for busy parents and their children.
“I think beauty speaks about God,” Campbell said. “So I tried to make really beautiful things that people actually want.”
But the Trump administration’s tariffs have thrown a wrench into Campbell’s Christmas planning, raising supplier prices and pumping unpredictability into the landscape for her and other business owners.
When President Donald Trump took office for the second time, the average tax on imported goods was 2.4 percent, according to Yale University’s Budget Lab. Since then, tariff rates have stretched as high as 28 percent. Last month, they hovered around an average effective rate of 11.8 percent.
Tariffs rates have fluctuated with the president’s whims. Some tariffs have targeted specific products: steel, aluminum, timber, and more recently, pharmaceuticals. Other tariffs have hit nearly all imported goods.
It’s made day-to-day operations, as well as planning ahead, difficult for Campbell.
“I think for a lot of small businesses—and I suspect most Christian businesses fall under this—we’re not working with huge, massive amounts of corporate money,” Campbell said. “We’re doing these things to follow this call and life the best that we can.”
Campbell said retailers like her were already beset by shipping costs, which spiked during the 2020 pandemic and never quite came back down. When the price of goods rose seemingly overnight, she put off plans to expand into an office space.
Sometimes, well-meaning Christians ask her why she doesn’t just make her products closer to home. Campbell is skeptical that customers would be willing to pay the prices US-based manufacturing would entail.
“We cannot compete with the prices of Temu and Shein,” Campbell said, referencing giant Chinese e-commerce companies.
But even if customers were to accept higher prices—as much as tripled for some products—Campbell has run into other challenges. She largely works with smaller factories in China that she visited in 2018, though some of her paper goods are produced in the United States.
When she looked for additional domestic manufacturers, Campbell quickly found that many factories were unwilling to produce her goods in the quantities she needed. Most of Campbell’s orders for a particular item are for around 500 to 1,000—a big order might hit 3,000.
The US manufacturers were working with Target and Walmart and “all the big names,” she said. One factory representative told her bluntly, she recalled, “Oh, the quantities you’re making, we wouldn’t even begin to talk to you.”
Eventually, Campbell decided it was best to stick with her existing suppliers and weather the storm in place—a strategy that is testing her faith.
“It’s so unpredictable that at this point, I’m just having to hand that over, because it’s heavier than I have the capacity to worry about,” she said.
In Bowling Green, Ohio, Jonathan Jakubowski is less anxious: He’s bullish that his American manufacturing company will ride out the tariff challenges.
Jakubowski has something of a gift for finding opportunity in tough environments. He couldn’t unsee the piles of plastic waste he encountered everywhere while living as a missionary in Guatemala. So he cofounded SmartSolve, an American manufacturing company that makes water-soluble, plastic-free packaging materials. Their products are used for everything from first-aid kits to feminine health care products to instant coffee packages that disperse in water.
Listed on the walls of SmartSolve’s offices are six core values with accompanying Bible verses. Jakubowski says they remind him that, no matter the economic headwinds, his focus is on faithful, innovative stewardship.
“My calling as a business leader does not change,” he said. “If tariffs raise my costs, I will innovate around them. …The economic environment is a variable; my mission is a constant.”
Jakubowski recalls previous economic issues that felt more challenging, including cargo shipping bottlenecks on the West Coast in 2021 that threatened their business.
While he said he aligns with a Milton Friedman view that tariffs are essentially a tax that raises costs for consumers, Jakubowski knows plenty of faithful believers who land on both sides of the tariff debate, which he calls a “prudential question, not a confessional one.”
“Scripture does not prescribe a tariff rate,” he told CT.
But the tariffs are real, and Jakubowski said he’s seen their effects on raw materials costs and on SmartSolve’s suppliers.
For some CEOs, like Matt Caputo, those impacts on overseas suppliers have felt almost personal—though with Caputo, a self-identified food geek, the word supplier doesn’t quite cut it.
When he talks about the overseas partners he relies on for his family’s specialty food business, he shifts into reverent tones.
“These are, you know, artisans,” he said. “They’re like the equivalent to a music fan of a rock star. They’re irreplaceable.”
That includes partners like a pair of brothers in Cantabria, Spain, who run a micro fish cannery.
“It’s basically one step above from two guys doing it in their garage,” Caputo said.
Or Luisa Abram in São Paulo, Brazil, who uses wild cacao pods discovered in the Amazon to make chocolate. Caputo’s is one of her most important buyers.
“It’s become extremely popular,” Caputo said. “People love it. It tastes unlike anything else. It’s literally wild, harvested from the Amazon, the only place in the world where this specific, unique genetic variety exists.”
Named for Matt Caputo’s father, Caputo’s Market and Deli has become something of an institution in Salt Lake City. The family-owned business is known for its cheeses and robust lunch sandwiches. It has earned glowing reviews from Wirecutter, particularly for its tinned fish.
“We’ve been really lucky with people taking interest in how excited we are about all things food artisans,” Caputo said.
Caputo comes by his love of food from both his Italian grandfather and his Greek grandmother, who also passed down her Orthodox faith. Caputo credits his family and church with forming how he, alongside his wife and mom, runs their business.
“We don’t want lifestyle inflation. We don’t want a yacht with a helicopter,” Caputo said. “We have more than enough of what we need, and so we don’t have to put profits first, and we want to put people first.”
For Caputo, that includes his international suppliers. But he’s seeing tariffs chip away at the goodwill he’s built over the years.
At one point last summer, products from Brazil had a tariff rate of over 50 percent, though later Trump dialed it back down.
“You know, we don’t grow a lot of cacao beans in America,” Caputo said wryly. “It’s been a lot to deal with for everyone.”
Caputo’s fish from Spain, meanwhile, are subject to the base tariff rate of 15 percent on the European Union.
“The biggest frustration for me is that we have proved ourselves, our company, as being worthy of our overseas suppliers giving us a disproportionate amount of their investment,” he said. “Historically, we’ve been a very dependable place to do business.”
The tariffs have shaken that faith. Caputo has seen partners pulling away their investments from the United States, with some choosing to divert less of their supply to the US or trying to find more partners elsewhere.
It’s not just those overseas who are affected. Caputo works with American artisans who have seen tariffs affect ingredients and packaging, which often comes from overseas.
The specialty food market generally has small margins. Caputo estimates he’s spent a third of his time constantly repricing.
“Say what you will about the general Republican platform, you can generally count on them trying to make a stable environment for business,” Caputo said. “That has been totally upended.”
Economists are waiting to see if tariffs accomplish the key goal Trump has outlined—boosting manufacturing and jobs in the United States. In the meantime, their observations echo what CEOs have seen firsthand: Tariffs have made things more expensive, layered on bureaucratic difficulties, and complicated business planning.
“Most everything is subject to a tariff, and prices of those goods have gone up,” said Scott Lincicome, a trade expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. Harvard Business School professor Alberto Cavallo estimated that tariffs have raised the overall Consumer Price Index by around 0.7 of a percentage point.
“Which,” he said, “in a massive US economy is actually a lot.”
While rising expenses are one hurdle, Lincicome is also seeing a split screen in terms of how businesses navigate the increasing regulatory complexity. Big companies have teams of accountants and lawyers to help solve problems. Meantime, “the little guys, they don’t have those resources.”
“Tariffs are absolutely a regulatory and bureaucratic nightmare,” he said. “The complexity of these tariffs is just nuts. It’s not one tariff; it’s five or ten tariffs, depending on your product. And they overlap with each other, and there are exemptions, and there are rules. … We went from a system that had about 3 steps to one that has 15 or 20 steps.”
There’s something else the big businesses do that small ones generally can’t: hire lobbyists to court exemptions to the tariffs. Some companies, like Apple, have won concessions.
Fred McGrath with the Christian Employers Alliance—a chamber of commerce for Christian companies—sees similar disparities among its members, who fall into both the pro- and anti-tariff camps.
Over the last year, he’s seen more faith-aligned businesses hire lobbyists and try to make inroads among policymakers in Washington.
“The somewhat unfortunate thing is it’s almost like a two-tiered system where the really big companies can afford the lobbying, can afford to have these DC policy shops and connections,” McGrath said. “But those little businesses that don’t have their same resources don’t know how to navigate this process. Of course, their voices are not being heard.”
Some groups have formed in attempts to fill that gap. We Pay the Tariffs, a coalition of over 1,000 small businesses, is one. Erica Campbell, with Be A Heart, signed on. Campbell has also gone to Washington twice with other signatories to speak with lawmakers—who have mostly told her there was nothing they could do.
With Congress passive, the judiciary has offered some remedy, albeit belated and incomplete. This February, the Supreme Court found one of the administration’s tariffs—a sweeping 10 percent charge on goods from nearly all countries—was unconstitutional. It has ordered the administration to offer refunds, which should start arriving this month to businesses that submitted claims through a special portal.
But when Caputo’s suppliers celebrated the ruling, he explained prices wouldn’t actually go down: The president quickly imposed another global tariff of 10 percent using a different provision. After facing legal challenges, the US Court of International Trade ruled this month that those levies are invalid, though the court did not issue nationwide relief beyond Washington state and two companies it ruled had standing. The administration had already planned to replace those tariffs with another round in July.
As for the tariff rebates, Campbell isn’t expecting any. “Since I have my suppliers manage the customs for me due to not having a large enough team to do it ourselves, it will be near impossible to receive any refunds,” she said.
Recently, as she was packing her kids into the car to go to school, on the heels of another night of insomnia, she felt that the anxiety of the tariffs had “gripped” her heart. That’s when, on the floor of the car, she spotted one of Be A Heart’s reusable ice packs. This one had the face of Jesus on it.
“He was just, like, staring up at me,” Campbell said. She felt her burden ease. “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m not alone in this.’”
Campbell is trying to carry that reminder with her, sometimes literally.
“I have to just do what is in front of me today and find God in front of me today,” she said, “with open hands, you know, and keep on.”
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