From Wayfair to Temu, Boston-based retail companies face gut punch from tariffs. But there's one that might benefit.

Boston Globe

03-04-2025

That leaves retailers with an unpleasant choice: hike prices and risk scaring off customers, or absorb the tariffs themselves and take a hit to profits.
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'Wayfair and a lot of companies have been trying to maneuver their supply chain away from China,' Bentley University
economics professor David Gulley said. 'But when the tariffs were announced [Wednesday], they were dramatically broader than expected, and hit basically every country we trade with. And then they were dramatically higher than what was expected.'
And that appears to have taken some companies by surprise.
As tariffs loomed on China in recent months, executives at Quincy-based women's clothing retailer J.Jill had been saying the company does not import much from China. Indeed, its top overseas suppliers, according to securities filings, are India, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
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'For the most part, you feel like we're in a pretty good place,' chief financial officer Mark Webb said at an investor conference in January. 'Where it lands, we will be extremely interested in . . . We'll have to wait and see.'
Trump announced tariffs on India, Indonesia, and Vietnam of between 26 percent and 46 percent.
J.Jill did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday; its stock price dropped 9 percent.
Boston-based Wayfair has also emphasized the diversity of its suppliers beyond China, in response to questions about tariffs in recent months.
'We as a platform, because we have 20,000-plus suppliers, we work with all of these folks,' chief executive Niraj Shah told analysts in February. 'So we haven't like made a bet, hey, we're buying from these Chinese factories.'
Still, on Thursday, while its stock price plunged nearly 26 percent, Wayfair sounded an optimistic note. The company said it remained 'well-positioned to continue offering customers the best possible combination of value, assortment, and experience,' adding that 'periods of disruption create opportunities for strong companies like Wayfair to grow market share by consistently delivering great options to customers.'
Wayfair's stock price plunged nearly 26 percent.
Andrew Burke-Stevenson for The Boston Globe
It wasn't all gloom for retailers. One potential winner — at least measured by stock performance price — from Wednesday's news appears to be TJX. The Framingham-based parent company of T.J.Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods brands saw its shares increase by 1 percent while the rest of the market tumbled.
Analysts pointed to the discount retailer's strategy of buying unsold merchandise on the cheap from other retailers that has already been imported and thus avoid additional tariffs as an advantage. Also, TJX's low prices could become more attractive to consumers feeling the pinch of higher prices from tariffs at other stores.
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'Among the better positioned in our coverage, we see off-price TJX . . . [as] trade down beneficiaries,' analyst Mark Altschwager at Baird Equity Research wrote in a report on Wednesday evening.
Of course, the goal of the tariffs isn't simply to shift consumption around among competing companies. It's to entice more manufacturing back to the United States, Trump said Wednesday.
'These tariffs are going to give us growth like you've never seen before,' he said. 'It'll be something very special to watch.'
But these New England-based retailers also illustrate why that will be harder than it might sound. For many products, building new factories will take years and cost billions of dollars. For simpler goods, like clothing, relying on more expensive US labor would cause prices to skyrocket.
'The problem with this strategy is that many of the goods sold by Wayfair and J. Jill involve labor-intensive production, which is why they are sourced in lower-wage countries,' Babson College emeritus economics professor Kent Jones said. 'It's difficult to comply with the new tariffs without resorting to production alternatives using high-cost labor.'
Container ships wait to enter the Port of Los Angeles.
ERIN SCHAFF/NYT
Trump's new policies also include closing a tariff loophole that some online retailers had been using to sell cheap goods from China. The regulation, known as the 'de minimus rule,' allows a shipper to avoid tariffs on shipments worth less than $800.
E-commerce sites such as Temu, with its US operation based in Boston,
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Amid the plunging stock market and rising consumer concerns, economic experts questioned whether Trump's goal of shifting all manufacturing back into the United States
'We make almost nothing from scratch in America, almost everything requires at least some inputs from abroad,' said Jason Furman, a former top economic aid to President Barack Obama who now teaches at Harvard. 'Overall a few companies will gain but many more will lose — while virtually all consumers will have to pay more.'
Aaron Pressman can be reached at