The Tariff Seesaw: China Sells Directly to American Consumers
Retail will never be the same
It was Sunday night. The sun was setting and I was already in bed. It had been a busy weekend and I was stretched out, scrolling TikTok. I got sucked in. You know how it goes. But amid the goofy dog videos, political rants, and Le Poisson Steve videos (which are now my favorites), a new kind of TikTok content kept popping up over and over again.
I watched in disbelief.
Is this really happening? I’d heard rumors, but to see it is something else.
China is selling products directly to American consumers.
Some manufacturers have set up a small room with handbags on shelves. Each item is numbered. They pull them down one at a time, show it, talk about it, model it, and tell you how to buy it.
If you buy two, you get a free Prada wallet.
Holy shit.
Another guy gives us a tour of his facility where he makes laundry pods. He's selling them for like 5 or 10 cents apiece or something. Um, Tide is about to have some major competition.
Sneaky words paint a deceiving picture
I worked in retail for two decades. I was a store manager for most of my career, leading teams on the sales floor. Once you start in retail, even at the store level, you learn pretty quickly that there are only a few factories that make most of the stuff we buy.
Once I learned that makeup was the same no matter if it was Wet n’ Wild or Lancôme, I never bought brand-name makeup again. It was a waste of money in my mind.
Handbags, too. Sure, there are differences in quality if you buy a Target bag versus a designer bag, but they may have been made very close to each other.
There are also sneaky little work-arounds.
A bag can be made in China, but then routed to Italy where the logo is sewn on. Then, the handbag company can claim it’s Made in Italy.
American consumers don’t know the difference. They equate Italy with being fancy. With being better than China. So, they pay enormous markups to the companies that import them to the United States.
Welp, probably not anymore.
A spokesperson for Lululemon told The Independent, “that only about 3% of its final products are manufactured in China.”
See what I mean with the wording? “Final products.”
It’s like when you get your iPhone and the packaging states, “Designed in California” or whatever. Yeah, okay. It was designed there, but it’s made in China. Retail companies know how to word things ever so slightly so customers have no idea what they’re actually doing.
Now, throw tariffs on top of all this.
It’s getting bananas.
The tariff seesaw
The current administration has put tariffs on a seesaw. The fat cat politicians sit on one end and throw their full weight into causing tariffs to skyrocket—especially for China. Then they change their minds. They lift their weight. Then it’s back again.
The US administration is mad at China because we import more of their stuff than they do of ours. The American fat cats want cheap stuff. They want cheap labor, but they want everything American made.
Well, that’s not how the world works.
China has figured out how to make all the shit we want to buy at scale. They produce massive amounts of stuff for giant companies because they’re one of the few countries that can do it.
They’ve done America a courtesy all these years by not disclosing to the American public what their manufacturing costs are. They never let us know how much these companies were price gouging us because they wanted to keep their customers happy.
Their customers are the giant companies.
Or should I say, they were.
With the utter quagmire that is tariffs right now, China is like, fuck it. Let’s sell directly to American consumers. They’re taking to social media to do it.
We are entering an entirely new way to buy stuff. One that we’ve never seen. I don’t know if American companies will recover from this.
American companies warn that these products could be counterfeit. They are telling people to shop with caution. But I don’t know. The damage may already be done.
Dupes
It was one thing when just a few of us knew how this worked. If you worked in retail, manufacturing, or importing, you knew. But the average American did not know how all this worked.
This direct approach to selling on the heels of the demand for dupes is about to be sheer madness. So, dupes, real quick -
For the past couple of years or so, women have been hunting for duplicates of their favorite brand-name items. Nicknamed dupes, these items keep increasing in demand. People began to realize that the dupes were just as good and didn’t want to pay the higher prices.
They didn’t want to or maybe couldn’t anymore. In this economy, almost everyone is looking to cut costs. An online creator, Nina Pool, has made this her entire business. She reads the ingredients in beauty products and tells her viewers which generic brands most closely align with the brand-name ingredients.
She tries everything herself and gives testimony about how well (or not well) the dupes work. She has 4.7 million followers on TikTok. She’s authentic and real, and people love her.
So, yeah. On the heels of dupes, China selling directly to American consumers—luxury brands in America may be toast.
Retail will never be the same
The illusion of luxury brands has been shattered.
Why would you pay thousands of dollars for something you can get for one hundred bucks? You wouldn’t. People won’t.
Rich people will find new ways to set themselves apart from the rest of us, but it may no longer be designer handbags. China’s got that on lock, and they’re not going to let go now.
Watching this play out in real time is absolutely wild. It feels like a fever dream. I never thought I’d see the day when the smoke clears and the mirrors shatter.
Wow.
So, is it good?
I mean, yeah. I’m all about flipping tables upside down. Too many companies have been taking advantage of consumers for far too long. They rigged the system to squeeze as much as they could out of us, and they’ve now been found out.
It’s the absolute, ultimate fuck-around and find out.
It just took decades to unfold.
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Kit Campoy is an accomplished retail expert and author. She leverages her two decades of leadership experience to inform and inspire. Kit is now booking panel speaking sessions for Q3 of 2025. Book a call on her website today!
When I was a little girl in the 1950s, my dad told me that generics were made by the same factories as the name brands and were identical except for the labels. 70 years later it sounds like China is just taking this to the next level.
The smoke and mirrors analogy is perfect! And thanks for clearly describing the moving parts in this ongoing reveal. Damn, are we ever in major seesaw!!!