Sarah LaFleur On the Existential Threat From the Tariffs

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

News, Investing, Business, News Commentary, Business News

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

America's textile industry has famously declined over the years, with a bunch of production moving to lower-cost places like China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. Now, with the Trump administration imposing heavy tariffs on exports from these countries, the US clothing industry is facing another big shock. In this episode we speak with Sarah LaFleur, founder and CEO of M.M.LaFleur, which makes high-quality work clothing for women (Tracy is a big fan). She walks us through what the past month has actually been like for a smaller clothing business trying to understand and deal with the tariffs. We talk about the conversations she's been having with mills and factories in China, how the tariffs are already impacting future seasons of clothing, the scramble to secure space on ships before the tariffs hit, and how businesses actually pay the new taxes.

Read more: A New ‘China Shock’ Is Destroying Jobs Around the World
One Ship, $417 Million in New Tariffs: The Cost of Trump’s Trade War

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1:27.4	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway.
1:28.8	And I'm Joe Wisenthal.
1:30.3	Joe, we've been inadvertently doing a tariff series, basically on what the trade restrictions mean for a bunch of different industries.
1:38.7	So funny. I read your mind. Yes, it's like we have to go down the list. There's actually, it's impossible.
1:45.4	You know, every industry is going to be affected by tariffs a different way. And there's this
1:49.8	temptation like, okay, let's just talk to someone from literally every single industry. Today on May
1:54.5	7th, we released an episode talking about the video game industry. But yes, we could we could go down
	...

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