Village Lighting co-owner Dawnita Hendricks on November 4, 2024 (Image: Screengrab via Village Lighting / YouTube)
For Jared and Dawnita Hendricks, the holiday season is usually the most profitable time of year. But thanks to President Donald Trump's tariffs, their business is on life support this Christmas.
According to a Friday report in NBC News, the Hendricks' business — Village Lighting in West Valley City, Utah – has had to pay nearly $750,000 in tariff-related costs in 2025 alone. The company's raw materials are often imported from Asia, and they've had to pay 50 percent tariffs on each individual item as a result of the president's signature economic policy.
"The tariff costs in and of themselves are not sustainable, and I don’t believe we can raise the cost enough to the consumers to be profitable," Jared Hendricks told NBC.
Village Lighting, which employs 15 people, posted one of its most profitable years on record in 2024. The company pre-ordered its 2025 inventory roughly a year in advance, and had completed all of its orders by February of 2025. However, by the time Trump rolled out his "Liberation Day" tariffs in April, it was too late for the Hendrickses to cancel their shipments. And because the company was determined to not raise prices on any items more than five percent, they've opted to eat the cost of most of the tariffs by "leveraging everything."
NBC also reported that Village Lighting attempted to adapt from lessons learned during the first Trump administration — in which the administration also imposed steep tariffs on imports from China — by diversifying their supply chain and sourcing goods from countries like Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia. But because virtually all countries were hit by Trump's 2025 tariffs, the Hendrickses have been unable to avoid paying significantly higher costs.
"We went from working towards a profit to working for tariffs,” Jared Hendricks told NBC. “It’s affected our home life, our health. It has been the most stressful, difficult, challenging year of 23 years of businesses that we ever had.”
The Hendricks' business isn't alone: The holiday supply industry is particularly reliant on Asian imports, and NBC reported that American small businesses that import holiday decor have spent an estimated $400 million on import duties in 2025. The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to overturn lower court rulings that declared Trump's claiming of emergency powers to impose tariffs to be illegal.
Click here to read NBC's full report.
