Trump’s beloved shoe company fought for life under his economy

President Donald Trump’s favorite shoes, Florsheim shoes, are suffering because of the tariffs that the president himself imposed.

“Our products are made in China, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and India,” Tom Florsheim, the creator of the shoes, told The Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell on Thursday. He went on to explain that although the shoe company used to be “100 percent U.S. manufacturing based” it since moved its facilities offshore “primarily due to the cost of labor. The shoe industry is a very labor-intensive industry. It's fairly low-skilled labor. And so work like that in the shoe industry as well as in the apparel industry moved offshore because of the comparative advantage you have in places like India as far as labor rates and having the labor that you need to make these types of products. And so when you think about what the U.S. really prefers to make, it's the higher value added products. And that's the way it's been for quite a while.”

As a result, Trump’s tariffs have forced him to raise prices on shoes.

“The past year, starting with Liberation Day in April, has been pretty crazy,” Florsheim told Rampell. “And we knew from the rhetoric during the campaign that there were going to be tariffs. But the day where it was announced what those tariffs would be was pretty stunning to us because on the countries that I listed before that make shoes, the tariffs were around 40 percent. And after that day, the tariffs got worse.”

He added, “The shoe industry actually pays pretty high tariffs to begin with. And so the numbers that I'm referring to are incremental on top of the normal tariffs. And so right after Liberation Day, there was a fight between the U.S. and China, and the incremental tariffs were ramped up to 145 percent. So what that means is if the first cost of a shoe is $50, you're going to pay a tariff of something like $75 on a $50 factory cost shoe. And so it just made the possibility of importing from China really non-existent. And we had this happen with other countries as well.”

Overall, Florsheim described the tariffs as having a drastic impact on his company’s bottom line.

“I think that we were all in shock because it really makes the situation that we're in as a company very difficult,” Florsheim explained. “And part of the reason for that is we work on a long timeline. So when the tariffs were announced in April, we had already sold shoes to all of our big customers, which are the department stores and the family shoe stores and the independents, for fall. And so the prices that we had sold those shoes for were locked in. We couldn't change that. And so all of a sudden the cost of our product in some cases is more than doubling and we're selling shoes and we're losing money.”

Trump's fondness for the shoe brand made news after his Secretary of State got ridiculed for wearing oversized shoes bequeathed by Trump -- who apparently likes to guess people's shoe sizes and buy them a pair of $145 Florsheim loafers.

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