Well, it's been an eventful news week, hasn't it? And yesterday was regular rollercoaster!
One thing you'll hear around our cutting table a lot is 'we cut in metres, is that OK? We're stubbornly Canadian about things like that'. We're also stubbornly Canadian enough to be fully in support of any targeted retaliatory tariffs that Canada might need to impose on the US as a result of their unjustified blanket tariffs against us.
We want to take a little bit of your time this morning to talk about how, and if, the potential tariffs between Canada and USA will impact our business and your shopping. We've heard lots of questions in the store and by email about both supporting the Canadian economy and worrying about the impact of tariffs on the fibres arts and home sewing industries.
At Fabrications, we've always supported Canadian brands and companies as much as possible. It's just how I live my life, and it's how I prioritize my buying for the store as well. We have been carrying more and more quilting cottons, rayons, and canvases from Northcott and Figo which are Canadian companies. So, more than half of our quilting cottons are already Canadian. When we do buy from American quilting cotton manufacturers, such as Moda or Dear Stella, we get them from Canadian distributors. I don't consider buying from a Canadian distributor to be 'buying Canadian', though. However, since most quilting cottons are milled and printed in South Korea, it's unclear how they might be tariffed when they are delivered to Canada for distribution. Not all quilting cottons land in the US before coming into Canada.
When buying apparel fabric, it's a lot easier to avoid textiles from American manufacturers. We get most of our apparel fabrics from two Canadian textile manufacturers, who produce their fabrics primarily in China, with some of their textiles being produced in Portugal, Italy, Spain, and France. Their shipments land in either Montreal or Vancouver and will not be impacted by tariffs, as far as we can tell. We also purchase apparel fabrics from a number of European Union and British manufacturers, who produce their textiles in the European Union. Again, in these cases, tariffs and avoiding American companies will be easy.
Yarns, embroidery kits and supplies, notions, books and patterns are a more complicated question. We get a lot these things directly from American companies, small American producers, independent American designers, and American distributors. I plan to continue buying from small and independent kit producers, pattern designers, and yarn producers who happen to be from the USA. The vast majority of our American business partners are small, woman owned and operated companies, who rely on their businesses and their wholesale partners for their livelihoods. I don't think that it will accomplish anything to isolate ourselves from these wonderful women. I've already had email conversations with some of them about ways we can work around any potential tariffs that Canada may put on their products coming into Canada.
Notions, threads, and rulers are another story all together. We use one major American distributor for the vast majority of our notions, thread, books, patterns, and sewing tools. This distributor has a wide range of most of what we need to restock on a daily basis, and in fact we order from them once or twice a week. This allows us to re-order things like patterns at a better cost because we can order 5 or 6 from several designers, without having to pay the same in shipping as the patterns cost us. The rulers we carry are produced entirely in the US, but we don't know where their materials come from. If the prices of their rulers increase dramatically, we may source alternatives.
We plan to pro-actively source sewing notions and supplies from European manufacturers, but the reality is that that might make basic notions like needles more expensive because of increased shipping costs. We are aware of some Canadian distributors for much of our supplies and notions, but their shipping is more expensive and ordering systems less efficient. We will do our best to balance prioritizing Canadian businesses with our own business needs and limiting shipping costs.
We've also started to hear some feedback regarding customers boycotting businesses that use Shopify for the e-commerce and/or point of sale platforms. We have used Shopify for e-commerce since 2018, and we are literally about to turn on Shopify point of sale for the store this week or next.
We've spent the last six months working towards a POS migration and had to pull the plug on another solution last month, after spending several thousand dollars on the project, because it wasn't going to meet our needs. We decided, after much debate, that having our entire business on one platform would make for a both a better admin and a better customer experience. We'll finally be able to have ONE gift card system!
I do have deep concerns with the direction that Shopify and it's founders have been heading in recent years in their non-Shopify projects and the way's they have relaxed their terms of service. At the risk of sounding like I'm making excuses, we don't have any other option for e-commerce platform. We've looked at all of them. The alternatives either can't handle selling fractions of metres, or they have a very poor online shopping experience, or they are 5x more expensive, or they can't handle the number of products that we sell.
We very much hope that customers can have compassion for the choices that small businesses have to make in order to just exist in the world lately. Our choice of sales and e-commerce platform comes from a constant balancing act and incomplete solutions patched together on top of internet technology that is a complicated house of cards with no design or plan for how it's supposed to all work together. Our choices about what and where to source products for the store is a combination of what we think our customers might want, what they're willing to pay, predicting trends, and our needs to stream line ordering thousands of products each year.
In a lot of ways there are still more questions than answers when it comes to Canada, the USA, and the textile industry. But, we know from years of hard work and experience that we as a team can figure out just about anything, and that our customers are kind and caring people who keep showing up for this small business. You can have confidence that we are doing everything we can to prioritize Canadian products and Canadian businesses.
For our American customers, we see you and value your part in our community as well! As of now, the threat of blanket tariffs has been paused. If it resumes in the near future, we will do our best to work with you to get your fabric and yarn to you in the most economical way possible.
As always, we are deeply grateful for the continued support of all of our customers, and we love seeing you and celebrating you online and in the store.
Happy crafting
Faustina and the Fabrications team
