Marketplace's Economic Pulse series brings you views on the economy from a range of perspectives. Today, we hear how one small business is navigating tariffs.

Fair Wind Fasteners is based in Newport, Rhode Island. They sell specialized screws, nuts, and bolts that hold boats together, among many other uses. Rob Lehmann is the company's founder and owner.

Lehmann joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour to discuss the state of business. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: So you guys sell nuts, screws, bolts made out of different interesting metal alloys. Who do you sell to? What are people using them for?

Rob Lehmann: You know, I started this business thinking that we would just supply the marine industry. We sell a lot of fasteners that are focused on the marine industry, but it turns out fasteners are used in a lot of different industries — the construction industry, the electrical industry, we're selling to machinery manufacturers, anything you can think of that would have a nut, bolt, or a screw in it.

Ben-Achour: And you source these components from kind of everywhere around the world, or how does that work?

Lehmann: We source our fasteners from the best manufacturers that we can find. And so that means looking all over the world for whoever is the best. Some of our fasteners come from the United States; we're trying to get a lot of them from the United States as of late. We get a lot from Taiwan, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, different countries in Europe — Italy and Germany — and China, as well.

Ben-Achour: So let me just ask broadly: How are you doing? How is business right now?

Lehmann: Well, business is still pretty good. You know, a lot of our customers are still spending money. The economy broadly is still going OK, but we are struggling with the cost of goods. With my inventory, costs are rising rapidly.

Ben-Achour: Yeah. How bad are these cost increases?

Lehmann: You know, we're seeing anywhere from 30 to 50% increase in cost of goods depending on the specific item we're looking at.

Ben-Achour: Are you having to pay these tariffs yourself, or is it your suppliers who have to pay them, and then you share the cost? Who all is paying for this?

Lehmann: So a little bit of both, some things we import directly. In that case, of course, I'm paying the tariff. And then I do get some items from larger distributors, who are paying the tariffs themselves and then passing the costs on to us.

Ben-Achour: And have you had to pass any of that on to your consumers?

Lehmann: We have had to pass that on to our consumer. You know, with my costs increasing 30% to 50%, that's basically all of our margin and more.

Ben-Achour: I mean, another thing that presumably you've had to contend with is the fact that these tariffs change so much. How's that been for you?

Lehmann: You know, the constant changing landscape of these tariffs is, quite honestly, the worst part about it. When I have a customer who asks me for a quote [for] tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of fasteners. I have to send them a quote back with footnotes at the end that say, "This is the pricing today. It's subject to changing tariff rates." And of course, that buyer says to me, "Well, you know, we need to know what the price is going to be for our project. We need to budget it. You need to give us a solid price." I just can't. I can't. You know, I might order them today, they might take 90 days to manufacture, and then I don't know what the tariffs are going to be 90 days from now at the time that they get shipped. So it's a really big problem.