Business Owner Tests If People Will Pay More for USA-Made

As a small business owner, Ramon van Meer said he’s used to hearing people say they’d be willing to pay more for products made in America.

When President Donald Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese imports by an additional 145%, van Meer decided to see if shoppers would put their money where their mouth is.

“I wanted to know the answer and then use it for my own company,” the Afina founder told Business Insider.

So the serial entrepreneur set about finding US suppliers to make his best-selling product: a specialized filtered shower head.

Van Meer said his filters are made in the US, some additional materials are sourced in Vietnam, and the final product is made in China with a single supplier.

To move everything over to the US, he said he had to find four to six separate suppliers who would handle various aspects of the production process. All told, he found it would cost three times as much to produce — more than the cost of simply paying the tariff.

Armed with real numbers, he set out to do a test with two identical products, with the only difference being their origin and, critically, their price: visitors to Afina’s website were presented with the option of a Chinese-made item for $129 or a US-made version for $239.

“I’m big on just testing it out with real data and real purchases,” van Meer said. “Not asking customers, not a survey, not even add-to-carts.”

“When somebody has to pay for it, that’s the actual real data,” he added.

After several days and more than 25,000 visitors, he said he sold 584 of the lower-priced shower heads and not one single purchase of a US-made version.

In a blog post that went viral, van Meer called the results “sobering.”

“We wanted to believe customers would back American labor with their dollars. But when faced with a real decision — not a survey or a comment section — they didn’t,” he wrote.

Nowadays van Meer said he’s spending most of his time trying to shift production out of China to a country with a lower tariff rate.

“Staying in China is not sustainable because even if they make a deal, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “The United States is also not an option, because there’s just no facilities that can make it.”

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Van Meer said Afina currently has enough inventory in its US warehouses to last until August, at which point he would have to start charging for the tariff.

Asked whether he would roll that cost into the price or apply a surcharge, as other businesses have said they would do, van Meer said he hadn’t yet decided.

“We’ll probably do testing,” he said.