Travis Campbell bought a closed soon Eagle Creek from VF Corp and moved the travel of travel travel to its hometown of Steamboat Springs in 2021, joining nearly two dozen outdoor companies in open air The city renowned for outdoor innovators. Former Smartwool chief and VF Corp Executive said that Eagle Creek “is the kind of small businesses that America should be proud”.
“But with these prices,” he told Senator John Hickenlooper in a Committee of the American Senate on the hearing of small businesses and entrepreneurship In Denver last week, “we have the impression that our country works systematically against small businesses like ours.”
At the moment, Campbell has $ 1.8 million in Eagle Creek equipment – Costaud packs, luggage, traffic jams built in Indonesia – which is about to be shipped to the United States
When Campbell ordered this equipment – that the retailers have already registered to put their shelves – he had to pay around $ 226,000 in prices. As part of the most recent price plan proposed by the Trump administration, this obligation would increase by $ 580,000.
“This is the kind of shock that is simply unbearable for us,” said Campbell. “During our 50th year of exploitation, we could be put out of business by the poorly planned commercial policies in our country.”
Campbell told the senator that the break on the prices gave him a certain breathing room, but he is preparing for losses and spending and projections of the reduction of prices in the event of destroying a process of planning almost two years of design, sale, order, manufacturing, shipping and distribution of Eagle Creek Gear.
“Today, I do not know where the prices and a small business owner are located not to know where these tariff inputs are,” said Campbell, who worries stress on his dozens of employees while they plan and replace the company. “It is a constant struggle to know what will happen.”
The audience of the Hickenlooper committee – held in the history of Colorado and entitled “Beyond the Trailhead: supporting outdoor leisure in an uncertain economy” – included Mike Mojica, founder and CEO of External elementwho designs adventure survival equipment in Englewood, and the veteran of outdoor clothes Trent Bush, the founder and CO-PDG of the new Artuct studio to boulder.
Mojica, a mechanical engineer who has refined his survival equipment activity in the Moosejaw company accelerator program In 2022, said that his company had published a record year in 2024.
“What I thought was a path to the American dream has become moving sands,” he said about the prices that have forced her to sell his equipment for zero profit. “Trade policy is supposed to provide companies with the certainty we need to make long -term decisions and for the moment, this certainty is missing. I no longer try to prosper. I try to survive. “
Bush started his first company to make snowboard clothes as a high school student in Boulder High in 1989. He tried to keep production in the United States but had to move abroad. He has spent the last 30 years to found six brands and work for large outdoor companies before launching Artilect, a technical clothing company, Boulder in 2019.
High prices “can force my business to close,” he told Hickenlooper. Bush said the Trump trade war “sparked an anti-American feeling that seriously damages American brands,” calling into question sales on foreign markets.
Campbell said he had received emails from customers and retailers in Canada who said: “We love your products, but we never buy another one.”
He hopes that the Trump administration is studying closely the possibility of national manufacturing before punishing businesses that manufacture abroad.
“I could have told them that it would be impossible to make our products here,” said Bush. “Do your research before turning off our lifestyles.”
Hickenlooper, who entered politics after opening the first Colorado brewery in a dark corner of Denver city center for decades before becoming a home for Tony restaurants and hotels, compared the recent prices proposals to those who leveled economies in South America in the 1960s and 70s. And the trade war raises growing pessimism.
“I think we are in the precipice of a recession and that it could be a serious recession and the losses that we will undergo will be structural. In other words, they will have a long tail,” said Hickenlooper. “It’s a difficult period.”