Business owner facing steep tariffs tests whether people will pay for ‘Made in USA’

An entrepreneur facing skyrocketing costs due to tariffs conducted an experiment to see whether customers would voluntarily pay more for a product made in America.

“The result was, unfortunately, disappointing,” Ramon van Meer told Fox News Digital. “We sold zero ‘Made in the USA’ shower heads.”

Van Meer, a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” is the founder of Afina, which sells a shower head that filters chemicals and heavy metals out of tap water. The shower head, manufactured in China and Vietnam, currently sells for $129.

But van Meer said as the cost of tariffs jumped to 170%, he wanted to test whether the company could successfully reshore manufacturing to the U.S.

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He found a U.S.-based company that could produce the shower heads — but at nearly triple the cost. To maintain Afina’s current profit margins, he listed the U.S. version side-by-side with the original with a brief explanation of the price difference, and gave customers the choice.

“I wanted to really test what [customers will] do if it comes down to it. How would they vote with their wallets?” he said, adding that he anticipated customers would gravitate toward the cheaper option, but not as dramatically as they did. “I was not expecting basically 100% and 0%.”

The landing page garnered nearly 26,000 visits over multiple days. Sometimes the U.S. version was the top, pre-selected option, and other times the Asian version was, van Meer said.

It didn’t matter. The cheaper option was purchased 584 times compared to zero purchases of the “Made in USA” version.

Van Meer shared the results on X, in a post viewed 10 million times as of Wednesday.

“We want to bring back domestic manufacturing. But when consumers face the actual price tag — they didn’t,” van Meer wrote.

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President Donald Trump has championed tariffs as a tool to decrease America’s trade deficit and return manufacturing jobs to the U.S. But van Meer said the country lacks the manufacturing infrastructure to produce enough goods to meet demand right away. 

“[In other countries] manufacturing plants can make thousands, in some cases tens of thousands, of units a day or a week,” van Meer said. “They have been doing this for many years, and they have all the machineries, they have the workforce. Versus in the United States, I basically had to start from scratch.”

He said he couldn’t find a single domestic manufacturer with the capacity to fill all of Afina’s monthly orders.

“Bringing back some manufacturing jobs is not a bad idea,” he said. “The problem is, I don’t think it’s gonna happen overnight. It’s gonna take a couple of years of a lot of investment, money and time, to actually build the manufacturing plants.”

And that still won’t allow America to manufacture 100% of its goods, van Meer said. He pitched a health-monitoring cat litter on season 15 of the show “Shark Tank” that he said could not legally be manufactured in the U.S. due to strict environmental regulations.

In the automotive sector, states like California are pushing for an all-electric future, but mining for battery minerals is an expensive venture in the U.S., often stalled by permitting processes and environmental regulations.

Afina’s shower head filter similarly contains materials not made in the United States, van Meer said.

“There’s a lot of products that, even if you wanted to bring it back, it’s just not possible,” he said.

Trump has paused or eased many of the tariffs announced on April 2, which he dubbed “Liberation Day.” But negotiations with China have remained contentious, with the Trump administration announcing a minimum 145% tariff on Chinese imports. China responded by boosting its tariffs on U.S. goods to 125%.

Van Meer told Fox News Digital the Asian-made shower head price is still at its pre-tariff level because Afina has six months of surplus inventory. Once that’s used up, he said the price will increase but will still be “significantly” cheaper than that of an American-manufactured shower head.

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Whether Americans support tariffs or not, van Meer said he hopes they recognize that most businesses are operating on thin margins.

“Some of us cannot even pay the new tariff bills, let alone build our own manufacturing plants,” he said.

A business offered customers a choice between a foreign-made product, or the same item made in the U.S. at a much higher cost. The results were overwhelming.