On Tuesday, a slew of new tariffs impacting the housing industry will kick in, including a 25% import tax on cabinets, vanities, and upholstered furniture.

Furniture manufacturing has largely moved outside of the United States, but in its heyday, Hickory, North Carolina, was known as the furniture capital of the world. Some American companies there survived offshoring, including Rock House Designer Brands, a group that includes Century, Hancock & Moore, and others. “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with CEO Alex Shuford III about the state of American furniture manufacturing. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Ryssdal: Would you give me the 30 second history of your company?

Shuford: Yeah, absolutely. We’re a 78-year-old furniture company, third generation, manufactured here in the United States. The original brand was Century Furniture, founded by my grandfather in 1947, and now we are seven different brands across nine factories and about 1,700 people here down in the North Carolina area.

Ryssdal: How’s business?

Shuford: Business is better than we suspected it would be at this stage in the process, but we're starting to see a little bit of weakness creep in.

Ryssdal: So let's talk about the process. I mean, here we are now in a new tariff regime. Furniture in this country has been challenged in a whole lot of ways in recent decades. What has 2025 meant for you?

Shuford: Well, it's been sort of a year of chaos. We budgeted for the year, of course, going in with the expectation that we'd start to see some lower mortgage rates, business would start to come back from the sort of post covid lull. And then in the spring, all of a sudden, we're faced with this tariff chaos-slash-changing environment. And tariffs are one thing, but the fact that it continues to change periodically is making it awful hard to plan.

Ryssdal: So if you take it from there that we have a continuing pattern of uncertainty. The president says he wants to protect American labor and American jobs and American companies. Is this going to be a boost for your business then?

Shuford: Yeah, we're funny. So you know, with nine factories here, there's a near-term boost. There's no question that we could see some people that typically import their product want to have it made, or at least quoted in the United States. But our big fear is that across the sort of medium timescale, and certainly the longer horizon, it’s pretty destructive to our retail furniture store base, the people that we sell furniture to. Because a lot of their revenue that they rely on to pay their bills, comes from a more moderate price point than ours, and and that customer is very price sensitive. And if they see that revenue column start to shrink, then that puts their store at risk, and we rely on those retail outlets to be successful.

Ryssdal: What about you as a maker of furniture? I mean, could you go out right now and hire 1,500 new woodworkers in North Carolina if you had to?

Shuford: No, that doesn't exist in the current environment. Training for that level of skill will take years. And frankly, on the timescale we're talking about, I'm not sure anybody's willing to make that investment where the payoff might be four, five, six years down the road.

Ryssdal: Well, so let's talk then planning and those year-to-year cycles you were talking about. So, I'm going to do an agriculture metaphor here. I talked to a lot of farmers, and they, of course, are very seasonal, and planting and harvest and all that jazz. Does furniture have seasons? Do you have a planning season and then a manufacturing development season?

Shuford: We do have development season. The two big trade shows are April and October, and most of the new product development is brought to market in those two time frames. But, yeah, when we're planning right now for what do we do in 2026 as far as new product development, we're scrambling. We don't know what country to take it to. Do you have no imported parts in it? Is our customer going to be willing to pay that price? Because I think one of the things that's misunderstood is that may well be that even with tariffs, the imported item is still less expensive than an equivalent item made here in the States.

Ryssdal: When you're out getting a cup of coffee or running into people at the grocery store, and you see colleagues of yours in this business, what's the chatter? What's the sideline hubbub?

Shuford: There's a lot of nervousness among my peers. We're in the budgeting season right now, trying to figure out what next year looks like, and directionally, everybody is obviously pointing down. There are a few players that see this as a positive, but I really think they're looking only out a few months and not thinking about the longer-term repercussions.

Ryssdal: I don't want to put words in your mouth, but long term, this is a net negative for you and for your company and maybe for your industry?

Shuford: Yeah, we're exactly the type of company that this is intended to benefit, and when we look across the longer arc of time, we see it as a net negative. We compete pretty well when you give us a chance, but if you keep changing the rules, it's awful hard to plan.

Ryssdal: Yeah, so let's talk about the long haul of history. But I want to go backwards a little bit. So, we were in Catawba County year ago-ish talking about fiber optics, which, in that part of the country is kind of amazing. There's plants and just incredible high-tech manufacturing happening. But originally, you know that part of this country was furniture heavy, as you know. So, here's my question, as we go back the 75-ish years your company has been around. Your granddad comes back today and looks at this company and looks at the environment, and do you suppose he turns to you and says, “Alex, please don't be the last one in this family to run this company?”

Shuford: Yeah, I think there's real concern about the sort of viability of a variety of companies. We're fortunate, you know, so for my granddad, I think he'd look at me and say, “Hey, look, you've built it so that you have a couple of paths forward.” What he would react to is the stress and strain of the environment we work under. He would shake his hand and say, “I'd never had it as complex as y’all have today.”