Beth Benike
speaker
87 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Beth Benike’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah. That's what it is today. Now let's just give it a couple hours. It might be something else this afternoon.
It's devastating. I cannot bring this product into the US now. I don't have that kind of money. And what that means then is if I can't bring in that product and I run out of what's in my warehouse now, then I no longer have revenue coming into my business. And what that means is I can no longer pay my employees. I can no longer pay my loans to which my house is leveraged against.
And in about six months, I could very, very possibly lose my home.
Yeah. I currently have two to three months worth of product in my warehouse. We just finished production of another two to three months of product. It was supposed to get on a ship two days ago.
From China to the U.S. And that was the day that tariffs jumped up to 54%. I have somewhere—give me a second. I want to pull out my numbers so I can tell you specifically— The effect. All right, we're going to do a little math. So for us, that meant instead of the $30,000 tariff we had budgeted for, it now was $85,000.
The product itself is worth $158,000. So suddenly you're faced with a potential $80,000 tariff on about $158,000 worth of goods.
Yeah, $85,000 for the 54%. And we don't have that, but we have good margins. We could survive that. And we thought, well, maybe we can do a GoFundMe. Because maybe right now in this political climate, people would be willing to give us $20 to help us get through this so that we don't have to raise our prices or go out of business. It wasn't devastating yet.
The next day, when it went up to 104%, that math is $164,000. Wow.
Yep. So that no longer makes business sense for me. I would have to double the price of my products. People are not going to pay double the price of my products. And especially my people. I'm selling my products to new moms and dads. They're buying diapers and formulas and other things that are about to get a whole lot more expensive for them.
It's already hard enough to be a new parent and to buy all the things you need to buy that you're not used to buying. People are only going to buy what they need.
And we would have to come up with that in the 30 to 40 days it takes for the product to get to the U.S. ? And I can't get any more loans. I'm fully leveraged. I have my house on the line already. I can't get more loans. I can't come up with that kind of money.
Once it hit over $100,000, there was no way we could afford to import our products anymore. And that's when we decided to just abandon it in China until we could figure something out. So the products are currently sitting at my factory. They've graciously offered to store them for us at no cost until we can find a new direction.
Well, here's the thing. I'm not in a face-off with the administration because I'm not a player in the game. I'm a pawn. There's literally nothing I can do. And I was coming up with strategies, but then any strategy I came up with, I'm afraid to execute it because the policy changes every 24 to 36 hours.
One strategy, which I have now since learned is illegal. But what a lot of people are talking about and are recommending is export your products to a different country. repackage them, and then re-import them to the U.S.
But you still have to make a change to it. You have to make a physical change to the product, the packaging. So we were thinking, well, we have some friends, personal friends that live in Australia. We could send it to Australia. We could then have them help coordinate repackaging and then import it from Australia. And with the 90-day pause, we'd only pay 10% tariff.
But that is country of origin fraud. So instead, I'm pivoting. I'm shifting gears. I'm going to try to find a way to sell it in another country. There are babies all over the planet. I unfortunately cannot sell it to Americans once I run out of what's in my warehouse right now, unless something changes, obviously. So I'm going to start looking for ways to sell it overseas.
Yep, that's what it's supposed to do. I have gone very deep down the research rabbit holes for my options for producing in the US. We did try to produce in the US initially. Once we got started and had market validation, we did work with a company in Minnesota to try to produce it here. There are some nuances to our type of manufacturing.
We have compression molding, which is a different kind of manufacturing machine than typical. We have the requirement to be a clean facility because our products go in baby's mouth. So it has to be a sterile facility. It can't just be any old factory. So now I have two options. I'm very fortunate that I have a 10,000 square foot commercial space in my building that's available for lease.
I could build my own factory in there. Like I own the building. I could build my own factory. So if we just like quickly look at that route, I got pricing for the machines that I need. I need eight different machines to make my products. The total of that, if I bought the machinery from China, would be just under $400,000. Wow.
Now, do I have to pay 145% tariff on top of that to get the machinery to be able to manufacture? Right now, probably. Yeah. So now we're doubling my cost to even set up manufacturing. But let's just say I don't. Then I have to find somebody with the expertise to set up the manufacturing and to run the manufacturing. But because this type of manufacturing doesn't really exist in the U.S.
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