Before I say anything else, I want to acknowledge what's happening in the world right now. It would feel wrong to write a post about business disruptions without saying it plainly: we are at war. War means people are dying, including over a hundred girls who were killed at their school, a place where they should have been safe. As of today, twelve U.S. service members have been killed and over 140 injured as well as over a thousand Iranians, the vast majority of them civilians. We have no idea when this ends, or how many more lives will be lost before it does. The disruptions to business are inconsequential compared to the human suffering in the Middle East, and yet both keep me up at night because no matter what is going on in the world, I still have to make payroll.
Running a small business right now feels like trying to land a plane while someone keeps moving the runway, the fuel gauges are unreliable, air traffic control keeps changing the instructions, and you've got a full cabin of passengers counting on you.
For most of the past year, the major challenge has been tariffs. Mightly makes certified organic, Fair Trade children's clothing, produced with our partners in India — partners we've worked hard to build genuine, ethical relationships with, and whom we've been committed to standing by even as U.S.-India trade policy made that increasingly expensive.
And when I say partners, I mean the whole chain of people behind every single garment. I mean the organic cotton farmers who chose to farm without toxic pesticides and chemical fertilizers— a harder, more expensive way to farm — because they believed brands like ours would show up and buy their fiber. If we and other organic brands stop ordering, those farmers have no market. I also mean the workers in our Fair Trade certified factory, who earn fair wages and receive Fair Trade premiums on top of that — real money that goes back into their families and their communities, into things like healthcare, education, childcare. These are not abstractions, they are people who made choices and built their livelihoods around the belief that ethical supply chains were real and sustainable. We feel that responsibility deeply. If you want to put faces and numbers to what Fair Trade certification actually means for the people in our supply chain, I'd invite you to read our 2025 Impact Report.
So when U.S.-India trade policy started making our model more expensive, walking away was never on the table. We were going to figure it out.
When reciprocal tariffs came into effect, we were already paying an average of 12% in tariffs. The new rate added 26% on top of that. We did the math, we negotiated, and then we placed our purchase orders and honored our commitment to our suppliers.
Then, by the time our goods reached customs, tariffs had increased by another 25%.
We're a small company. There is no war chest to absorb a surprise like that. We had to move tens of thousands of dollars that had been earmarked for new inventory just to clear our existing shipment. Then we had to raise prices and still take a margin hit going into Q4. For a small business, Q4 isn't just important — it's often the quarter that makes your year. Instead of capitalizing on it, we were selling close to cost just to break even. And because our inventory budget had been redirected to pay tariffs, we didn't have enough product to meet demand. We ran out. Customers who needed what we make — parents who care about what touches their kids' skin, families managing allergies or sensory sensitivities, people who've made a commitment to buying environmentally responsible products — couldn't get it.
There aren't many alternatives for parents who want genuinely certified organic, Fair Trade kids' clothing. That's precisely why Mightly exists. And the weeks we spent out of stock confirmed something I already believed but now know beyond a doubt: the need is real. Our customer service team was flooded with messages asking when we'd restock. I had a customer track down my personal phone number (which takes some serious digging) to tell me we're the only brand she trusts for her son's clothes, and to ask when his size would be back in stock. That call meant everything to me, even in the middle of all the chaos.
We finally got through it. A new production run was completed just as the Supreme Court ruled the new tariffs illegal. It genuinely looked like we might catch a break and we had actually started running numbers on a modest price reduction to pass the savings along to our customers.
Then the Middle East situation exploded. Our standard shipping routes closed. We had to find alternative paths to get our products from India to our U.S. warehouse using a longer, less predictable route. Freight and insurance costs spiked. The price reduction we'd been working on? Out of the question. The carefully mapped-out plan for the year? Back to the drawing board.
To other small business owners: unpredictability is uniquely brutal for us in a way that gets lost in the broader economic conversation. Large companies can hedge. They have scenario planners, financial cushions, supplier redundancy. We don't. When tariff rates shift 25% between the day you place an order and the day it clears customs, you can't absorb that — you make painful choices, fast, with incomplete information. Every surprise costs us not just money but the ability to serve our customers, invest in our people, and grow.
What's kept us going is our values. Our partnership with our producers in India isn't a nice-to-have, it’s the actual operating principle of this company. We make Fair Trade, certified organic clothing because we believe the people who make children's clothes deserve safe conditions, fair wages, and dignity — and because the children who wear those clothes deserve products made without toxic chemicals or exploitation. We're not going to walk away from that because it got hard (really, really hard). We're going to keep figuring it out in solidarity with our suppliers and our customers.
Remember, your dollars are a vote. Spend them with businesses — small or large — that are willing to do things the right way even when it's hard. That's how we make the right way the normal way.
Mightly makes certified organic, Fair Trade Certified children's clothing. Learn more at mightly.com.