Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

It has been a full year since President Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs and pretty much completely upended U.S. trade policy. Now, many of those tariffs have been

struck down by the Supreme Court, but some of Trump's tariffs remain and more are likely coming.

Right now, the effective tariff rate sits at 11 percent, per the Yale Budget Lab, which is still

way higher than it was at the beginning of 2025.

And small businesses have really felt the brunt of these shifting tariffs.

So today we're going to talk with a couple of small business owners about what the past year has been like.

First up joining me is Justine Khan.

She's the founder and CEO of Botnia Skin Care in Sausalito, California.

Justine, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

Tell us a bit about botania skin care and what you do.

So I have an organic skincare company in Sausalito, California. And really what we do is we hand-make skin care kind of in an old-fashioned

way. We manufacture 100% of our skin care in-house. We have a micro farm here in California where we grow

a lot of our own plants for our skin care. And we supply mainly spas

across the United States. We have about 400 spa partners nationwide that rely on us for our

skin care. Now, I guess you're the perfect example of how these tariffs have rippled through the economy because you just said you make most of your products here in the United – you make all of your products here in the United States, and yet you were still impacted by tariffs.

So take us back to last year.

When did you first realize that this new tariff regime was going to impact your business?

Yeah.

I mean, oh, man, it's so interesting being a values-based business like we are because, you know,

we control so many pieces of how we create our products.

But the things that are out of our control are really things that

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