INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: the tariffs are destroying our industry

We got into this career to make things. Beautiful things, functional things, real things. And right now, I'm watching that slowly slip away.

I used to love telling people I work in product development. The look on their face when you explain how things actually get made. The complexity behind something as simple as a button click or a hinge mechanism. Nobody's making that face anymore. It's been replaced by worry.

I'm watching hardware startups that were ready to launch just freeze. Manufacturing partners we’ve worked with for decades are suddenly unsure if they can keep going. Lead times that were already rough are now impossible. Costs that were tight are now prohibitive.

This isn’t abstract policy, or theory, it’s happening.

Tariffs are driving huge cost spikes overnight. American companies can’t eat that. They can’t pass it to customers either. So they stall. Projects get shelved. Launches go indefinite. Teams get cut.

There's a particular feeling when a project dies. Not the dramatic kind where someone pulls the plug. The slow kind. Where emails stop getting answered. Where timelines just quietly stop updating. Where everyone knows but nobody says it. That feeling is everywhere right now.

The goal was to force manufacturing back to the US. But you can’t just flip that switch.

The tooling doesn’t exist. The expertise is gone. The supply chains aren’t here. You can’t rebuild thirty years of infrastructure in six months. So companies don’t reshore. They just collapse.

Even the ones willing to invest don’t. Because no one trusts the policy will last. It’s too volatile. No sane business spends hundreds of millions on reshoring when policies are constantly shifting, or could get completely reversed at the end of an administration.

So nothing moves.

Tariffs block overseas production. Uncertainty blocks domestic investment. Everyone’s paralyzed.

Meanwhile, the entire global manufacturing system runs on interdependence. When the US throws up walls, it creates chaos everywhere. European, Asian, and Latin American partners are all scrambling.

This isn’t saving American jobs. It’s killing them.

Designers are getting laid off because projects are dead. Engineers are benched because prototyping is unaffordable. Startups are folding because their runway vanished overnight.

We're already sliding toward recession, and manufacturing is the canary in the coal mine. It’s getting hit first and hardest.

This economic malpractice is playing a game with real people's lives. And it has to end.

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