On April 2nd, US Government officially introduced tariffs on imported goods, directly impacting ATD Supply operations, together with its sales to US-based customers.
After a few days, tariffs toward EU (including Italy) were withdrawn and are now suspended for 90 days, making our bags tariff-free for US-based customers as they were before, but the damage was already done: they didn't even need to be actually introduced to influence markets, since just announcing them weeks before was enough to make sales fall and make some raw materials prices increase. 
This isn't the best place to discuss if a global free market is the best system or not, nor to determine if the distortions it can generate are a fair price to pay for the possibilities it provides. It's not my job to say if these tariffs are or are not a clever move, but it's my job to face this change and find ways to reduce sales losses without attacking either my margin or my customers' spending power, whether this means finding Far East manufacturing partners to reduce production costs enough to absorb tariffs, or replacing the American fabrics I use that would become more expensive if tariffs became reciprocal.
The possibility of telling the world about my products and sell them internationally, shipping them to users everywhere in the world, made ATD Supply possibile (at least) as much as the design or the manufacturing quality of its products.
This possibility allowed an untrained young Italian man into anthropology and backpacking to start from his travel experience and develop a backpack with a complex construction and some definitely then-uncommon features, to gather the best materials from all over the world (from Italy to USA, Germany and the Far East), to find a manufacturing partner in central Italy who was skilled (and crazy) enough to start its production, to launch it on an international crowdfunding website and finally to collect orders from all continents except Antarctica. 
Over these years, even though that backpack keeps being ATD Supply's bestseller, I've dropped many products and fulfilled thousands of orders, managed even more thousands of customer interactions and placed my products in a small but curated bunch of international retailers. All without selling (almost) nothing here in Italy.
Since the beginning, in fact, this project had an international scope: all contents I created and the language I chose targeted a global audience and I ended up with more than 98% of total sales being exported outside of my country, almost 50% of them being shipped to USA.
So, it was good to see that a few days after being announced, tariffs toward the EU were withdrawn for 90 days. This means that there are around 90 days to take advantage of the situation: ordering our bags from from the US for the next three months would mean having no tariffs applied, as it was before.
With the ATD1 backpack in stock and the ATD2 backpack available for preorders (it will be shipped at the end of June), together with almost all our accessories ready to ship, and our promotions on shipping costs, this is the perfect time to gear up.
USA Tariffs: announced, introduced, withdrawn. Future challenges and the perfect time to gear up.