‘It is absolutely crushing to my business’: Trump’s tariffs hit Kickstarter campaigns hard

Curt Covert would love for people to play his latest board game—but with sky-high tariffs, he’s not sure anyone ever will.

“At 54%, I had a plan,” Covert tells Fast Company, referring to a tariff rate on imports from China imposed by the Trump administration in early April. That rate has nearly tripled since. His reponse: “145% brings business to a standstill. It is absolutely crushing to my business.”

Covert is the owner of Smirk & Dagger Games, a small Connecticut-based company that has been making quirky board games for more than 20 years. Its latest title, A Place for All My Books—a game designed for introverts with a love of literature—was backed by 16,000-plus Kickstarter supporters, raising more than $1.1 million in pledged orders. “This was our biggest campaign ever,” Covert says.

Around 13,000 of those backers are in the United States. Now Covert is trying to figure out how to fulfill their orders amid a trade war, since the game is manufactured in China. “The tariffs make it impossible to import anything,” he says.

Even more pressure on creators

Covert isn’t alone. In recent weeks, numerous Kickstarter creators have used the platform to warn backers about shipping delays, rising costs, and other uncertainties. “We have to revisit the numbers again, and again, and perhaps again,” one creator wrote in an update. “We’re in one helluva predicament right now,” admitted another.

Kickstarter has addressed the issue in multiple blog posts and is exploring new ways to support creators. While the platform hasn’t seen a spike in canceled campaigns, a spokesperson acknowledged the pressure in a statement: “Tariffs and rising production costs are putting even more pressure on independent creators, many of whom already operate with limited resources and tight margins. If these changes remain in place long term, they’ll continue to pose real challenges around pricing, fulfillment, and backer communication.”

Kickstarter gained prominence for ambitious consumer electronics projects like the Pebble smartwatch, but it has long been a favorite of smaller creators, particularly in the board game community. To date, the platform has hosted nearly 1 million game campaigns, which have raised more than $2.5 billion.

Much of that funding supported games manufactured in China, according to George Lam, former head of Kickstarter outreach in Asia and now a crowdfunding consultant. “There just aren’t manufacturing sites outside of China that can do this,” he says. Those creators now face steep import taxes. “The board game space is very fragile,” Lam adds. “A majority of them are really small companies or mom-and-pop-type operations.”

A stopgap measure to buy time

Covert recently got a taste of the tariffs’ impact when a delayed shipment of games was hit with a 20% tariff for leaving port two days after a grace period ended—resulting in a $60,000 import tax bill. Now he’s preparing to ship $500,000 worth of games to the U.S. and is scrambling to avoid paying what could amount to more than $700,000 in tariffs.

He’s spent the past few weeks working on contingency plans, and believes he’s found a temporary work-around. Logistics companies have long used so-called bonded warehouses in the U.S., where imported goods can be stored tariff-free and are taxed only when they leave the warehouse. Covert hopes to use one of these facilities to buy time, ideally until a new trade agreement is reached. If the trade war persists, he may need to ask Kickstarter backers to pay significantly more to receive their games on time. “You can ask for a little patience,” says Covert. “But at some point, the backers will lose confidence.”

One of the Trump administration’s justifications for the tariffs is to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Covert is skeptical. Most of his games can’t be produced domestically, and the few that could would be far more expensive. “A simple party game with cards that normally would retail for $20 . . . If I produced it here in the U.S., it would be a $50 dollar card game—and no one in the U.S. would pay [that].”

Could new U.S. factories fill the gap? “That takes three to five years, not three to five months,” Covert says.

Chinese manufacturers might actually benefit

Ironically, Chinese creators might be the ones to benefit most from the current situation. Many are large manufacturers that have pivoted from producing goods for Western brands to launching their own products on platforms like Kickstarter. “They’re in a much better position to cut costs, or find a different tariff code, or find a better logistics partner,” says Lam. “It’s what they do all day.”

Still, Lam believes there may be a silver lining for Western creators. If global trade slows down, so might shipping and marketing costs. “The manufacturing cost of your product is often not the biggest cost on a per-unit basis,” he says. “If you sell something on Kickstarter, you might pay $15 to the factory to make it. But you might pay $40 [for ads on] Facebook to acquire one customer for it.”

Ad prices on platforms like Facebook have surged in recent years, driven by heavy spending from Chinese e-commerce giants like Temu and Shein. Now that these companies can no longer ship to the U.S. tariff-free, they’ve started dialing back their ad budgets.

Covert, however, remains unconvinced that any of this will help him get his new game—or any future titles—into the U.S. without prohibitive costs. “[Losing] the ability to print new games, and bring them in affordably would be the end of my company,” he says. “It won’t [even] take a year.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91320825/tariffs-hit-kickstarter-campaigns?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss