特朗普关税下，海波因特的沙发厂只开了十个月

A sofa factory bought for zero dollars shut its doors just ten months after starting up; after running the numbers, the founder had lost about three million dollars.

The man who closed the factory is named Bruce Krinsky; together with his wife Chaya he founded the American furniture brand TOV.

On July 31, the Revival factory in High Point, North Carolina, stopped production, and roughly forty-five jobs disappeared with it.

North Carolina's furniture industry once supported ninety-one thousand people — that was in 1990; by this year, the number was down to just twenty-seven thousand.

When TOV started out it sold sofas made in China, nine hundred dollars apiece, relying on Asian supply chains to push costs as low as possible.

After the United States imposed tariffs on Chinese goods, Krinsky set his sights on Vietnam.

He persuaded his long-time supplier Zhiwei Furniture to head south and build a new plant in Dong Nai Province, outside Ho Chi Minh City.

The new plant went into production in March 2025, with about one hundred and thirty workers, thirty of whom were transferred over from China.

Nguyen Van Hai wraps fabric onto sofas at the factory, working up to ten hours a day, six days a week, earning about eight thousand dollars a year.

His assessment of this income was just one sentence: really high.

The turning point came when the United States proposed a forty-six percent tariff on Vietnamese goods, and Krinsky began looking for factory space back home in the US.

In High Point he bought a ready-made factory; the purchase price was zero dollars.

He named the factory Revival, planning to move sofa manufacturing from Asia back to the United States.

The math quickly became impossible: in High Point, the materials and labor for one sofa come to about one thousand dollars.

The same materials and labor cost only two hundred and eighty dollars in Vietnam.

Add in the other expenses, and the total cost of making one sofa in the US is about one thousand two hundred and thirty dollars, versus about six hundred and fifty-five in Vietnam.

The efficiency gap is just as obvious: according to Krinsky, workers in High Point make two to three sofas a day.

At his Asian partner's operation, it is ten a day.

He set the retail price at around one thousand five hundred dollars, yet he still lost more than one hundred dollars on every sofa sold.

He said that once the price reached two thousand dollars, the company would have no reason to exist.

Two thousand dollars is roughly this factory's break-even point.

The losses could not be stopped; on July 31 he shut the factory, having lost about three million dollars over ten months.

He said he had voted for this president three times, yet now he could not say clearly what an American business could still do.

In High Point, another furniture company offered a different answer.

George Jordan, president of Michael Thomas Furniture, said his sofas retail between three thousand and five thousand dollars.

Only at that price level can American labor and factory space be supported.

This factory employs one hundred and fifty people; in High Point, the starting wage for a skilled sofa worker is about forty-five thousand dollars, and the best can exceed ninety thousand.

Jordan said that pushing sofa prices below two thousand dollars would be very difficult.

The trouble does not stop at costs: US Customs intercepted seventeen shipments sent from Dong Nai, about forty-five containers.

The resulting bill was one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars; Krinsky hired a lawyer and is preparing to dispute the charge.

After the closure, about seventy percent of TOV's furniture went back to being made in Vietnam; the company's annual revenue exceeds one hundred million dollars.

Tariffs are still climbing: the rate on Chinese-made upholstered furniture is fifty percent, and on Vietnamese twenty-five percent.

According to plan, in January next year these two numbers will become fifty-five and thirty percent.

The factory is closed, orders have returned to Vietnam, and the next step in tariffs is already scheduled for January next year.