Weighted blanket startup Bearaby is pausing much of its production in light of 50% tariffs on India

In turn, Bearaby — a startup that sells weighted blankets — posted a message on its website on Friday and sent an email to customers telling them that it would be stopping production of its blankets, all of which are made in India. “Because of sudden 50% tariffs, we’ve had to stop production of our blankets – something we never imagined having to do,” the message read. “Some favorites are already gone, and we don’t know when, or if, we’ll be able to make them again.” 

In an interview with Modern Retail, Bearaby founder Kathrin Hamm clarified that the company would only be pausing production of its blankets for the U.S. Bearaby launched in Germany last fall, and Hamm said the company would continue manufacturing products for Europe. Bearaby also sells other products, like bamboo sheets, but is known for its weighted blankets.

Bearaby is just one of many startups having to make hard choices right now. The Trump administration has pursued a whiplash tariff policy — threatening sky-high tariffs only to lower them or push them back weeks later — leaving brands scrambling to adjust to the latest change in policy. Many brands have spent the past few months raising prices, rushing to get in inventory before the next tariff change or looking into partnering with new manufacturers in other countries.  

But Bearaby is an especially difficult position. As Hamm explained, Bearaby’s blankets are hand-knit; it takes two to three hours to make one blanket. “Just to have people in that skillset, it takes many months to train people,” Hamm said, which makes building supply chain redundancies particularly challenging for Bearaby. 

It also couldn’t come at a worse time for Bearaby. The company likes to keep four to six months’ worth of inventory on hand, and it typically takes about four weeks for a shipping container to reach the U.S. with Bearaby’s products. August is typically when Bearaby massively increases its inventory load in preparation for the fourth quarter, which is when the brand typically does most of its sales. 

But Hamm also didn’t want to raise prices. So, she’s instead opting to pause most of the production for her best-selling product. She spent the weekend in India, looking at ways the brand could potentially streamline production, doing trial runs with different types of materials, all in the hopes of finding ways to lower costs. 

And she said for a startup like Bearaby, “when you have a product that is highly manual and not high volume” — at least compared to a giant corporation — “it is harder to negotiate.” 

So, Hamm has opted to pause production for now. But, she says Bearaby is not going anywhere – “We are diversified enough that we can sustain the pausing of the U.S. [production]” — and she feels the pause gives her more time to evaluate different options.

She’s not sure exactly when she’ll restart. “If the tariffs are going away, then obviously, we would be able to restart production,” she said. But she wants to have a long-term plan that she feels confident will allow her to navigate the macroeconomic environment for months, not just weeks. A three-week extension of the Aug. 27 deadline, for example, “would not be enough for us to restart production.” 

And, she feels like she doesn’t really have any direction on where she should move manufacturing to, instead, as any other country could be hit with sky-high tariffs from the U.S. at any minute. “It feels like no matter how diversified you are, you can’t really plan,” she said.