A small business ran a clever experiment to see if consumers would pay more for American-made products — and the results were decisive.
Ramon van Meer — owner of Afina, which sells self-filtering shower heads — was facing skyrocketing costs due to Trump’s new 145 percent tariff on Chinese-made goods.
To explore reshoring, van Meer sourced a US manufacturer — only to find his production costs nearly tripled.
‘We make a $129 filtered showerhead in China. With tariffs surging we explored US manufacturing,’ he wrote on X. ‘We found a US supplier. Our costs nearly tripled.’
To test consumer appetite, van Meer offered 25,000 shoppers a choice: the original $129 ‘Made in Asia’ shower head or an $239 ‘Made in USA’ version — an 85 percent increase in price.
At the conclusion of the experiment not a single customer bought the American-made version.
Furthermore, fewer than 1 percent got as far as adding the American product to their carts. Meanwhile, 3,500 bought the cheaper model.
‘It wasn’t a marketing failure—it was a referendum on price,’ van Meer said.
Ramon van Meer tested whether consumers would pay more for American made products
Afina’s landing page showed the two different options
Van Meer said business owners often hear consumers say they would pay more for domestically-made products but he was skeptical if they would do so in practice.
‘The results were brutal,’ van Meer admitted of the experiment.
‘We want to bring back domestic manufacturing. But when consumers face the actual price tag — they didn’t,’ he explained.
‘It’s not because they don’t care. I think it is because most people are not willing to pay the premium (yet).’
Van Meer said his team ensured marketing for each item matched perfectly, they also ran the experiment over multiple days and traffic sources.
‘For a moment, we thought we’d made a technical error. We hadn’t,’ he wrote on Afina’s website.
The business owner said he doesn’t blame American consumers, who have faced years of inflation and now an uncertain economy.
‘If policymakers and pundits want to rebuild American industry, they need to grapple with this truth: idealism doesn’t always survive contact with a price tag’ he wrote.
Afina sources partly from China and Vietnam which have both been slapped with US tariffs
Consumers are set to find rising prices across an array of goods as the consequences of Trump’s tariffs begin to trickle through.
Ford has informed car dealers that sticker prices will climb across its vehicle fleet in June.
Amazon has incurred the wrath of the White House by advertising the cost of tariffs on the items it sells online.
The ecommerce giant was later forced to back down after Trump declared ‘war’ on the ‘hostile act.’
