Canadian fashion designers get creative amid Trump tariff threat ...Middle East

Chloe Gordon and Parris Gordon Morris, the designers behind the fashion label BeaufilleCourtesy Beaufille/Supplied

Last summer, Parris Morris, who is one-half of the design team behind the Canadian women’s-wear and jewellery brand, Beaufille, moved to Los Angeles with her husband and their dog. In part, she was fulfilling a lifelong dream of living in California. But more importantly, she was following the money: upward of 70 per cent of Beaufille’s customers shop from the U.S.

“We’ve always wanted to have a home base in a city that has historically helped our business expand,” she says. Los Angeles, with its celebrities, influencers and their stylists, is fertile ground for boosting brand awareness. In California, Morris would handle the jewellery side of the business, while her sister and co-designer, Chloe Gordon, stayed behind in Toronto. From Beaufille’s Canadian studio, Gordon could continue to design the brand’s fashion collections and manage inventory that is shipped to customers and retailers in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Trump administration’s threat of tariffs on Canadian goods entering the U.S. complicated things. Now, like many independent Canadian fashion designers that operate on both sides of the border, Morris and Gordon are trying to forecast a future that could include raising prices and shifting operations to avoid losing business.

Beaufille’s Suede BagSupplied

Made in Canada has been a challenging standard for both large and small fashion brands to uphold since the 2000s, when the availability of lower-cost overseas production became the norm. There was a time when the garment districts of Toronto and Montreal were humming and a Canadian origin tag on a Canadian garment was a given, but most designer fashion brands that still produce in this country now depend on a shrinking network of small factories, home sewers and their own studios.

For Beaufille, that meant looking beyond Canada’s borders to Portugal, where it manufactures its clothing at factories that meet Morris and Gordon’s needs around quality and quantities. In an effort to head-off the tariffs, the duo is working with a third-party logistics company on the best plan for importing and warehousing their pieces from Europe, whether that be into Canada or directly into the United States. They’re also exploring manufacturing options within the U.S., both from the perspective of cost savings and sustainability. Beaufille plans to absorb any tariffs in the interim rather than pass the cost onto its customers. “U.S. customers are not used to paying duties,” Morris says.

The American consumer’s duty-free expectations are as a result of the de minimis exemption, a trade policy that allows orders under US$800 in value to enter the country without additional fees. The exemption is also being re-examined by the U.S. administration.

Montreal-based footwear and accessories brand, Maguire, is converting its New York Nolita neighbourhood store into a small fulfillment centre.Supplied

The policy has been advantageous for Montreal-based footwear and accessories brand, Maguire, which used it to successfully test the waters in the U.S. market before making the decision to open two New York stores. Americans now make up 30 per cent of the brand’s customer base even though customers south of the border pay the same price in U.S. dollars for its footwear as a Canadian shopper pays in Canadian dollars. “Expanding our U.S. fulfillment capacity was already part of our growth strategy. However, we now need to accelerate this shift by sending more inventory to the U.S. and officially converting our Nolita neighbourhood store into a small fulfillment centre,” say Romy Maguire, who helms the brand alongside her sister Myriam.

Since their products are manufactured mainly in Spain, Italy and Portugal, the Maguires are unsure of whether they will be considered European or Canadian by customs authorities. Despite the headwinds, the sisters are maintaining a positive attitude. “Entrepreneurship means constantly navigating new challenges,” Myriam says. “As long as we have customers who love our products, we’re good.”

Everyone in the industry isn’t as positive. In a LinkedIn post dated Feb. 5 that announced a temporary layoff of 40 per cent of the workforce at the Montreal-based tights company, Sheertex, CEO Katherine Homuth wrote that “this isn’t just a tough moment for [Sheertex] – it reflects the fragile state of domestic manufacturing in Canada.” Her post continued, “Brands that outsource production can pivot quickly, but companies like ours, who’ve built vertically integrated operations here at home, face far greater challenges.”

. “We have seen tremendous demand for our products worldwide and we see this demand continuing to grow,” she says. “If we can get through the troubling and uncertain times of COVID, when I launched this business, then we can get through anything.”

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