Portland businesses hit hard by tariffs await refunds months after Supreme Court ruling

In February, a split ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the sweeping tariffs President Trump had imposed early last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. As a result, last month the Customs and Border Protection agency opened an online portal for importers and customs brokers seeking refunds for the estimated $166 billion in tariffs companies had paid to import goods.

Some businesses have started receiving their refunds while others, including Portland-based Steven Smith Teamaker, are still waiting. As the Portland Business Journal reported last month, 90% of its ingredients are imported, making the company subject to volatile tariff rates that rocketed as high as 50% at one point last year. CEO Darren Marshall says that the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in unanticipated tariffs, which its customs broker has filed on its behalf to recoup. Revant Optics, a Portland manufacturer of replacement lenses for sunglasses that launched its own line of sunglasses last June, is owed nearly $700,000 in duties it paid on imports from China and Taiwan, according to CEO and founder Jason Bolt.

Marshall and Bolt join us for more details, along with Chris McKinney, president of Brownstone International. The Portland-based customs broker has filed claims for tariff refunds on behalf of Steven Smith Teamaker and dozens of other clients.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In February, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the sweeping tariffs President Trump had imposed soon after he began his second term. Last month, the Customs and Border Protection agency opened an online portal where companies that paid an estimated $166 billion in tariffs can apply for refunds. We’re going to hear today from two Portland businesses who have done that and are waiting for their money. Darren Marshall is the CEO of Steven Smith Teamaker. Jason Bolt is a founder and CEO of Revant Optics, which makes replacement lenses for sunglasses. They both join us now along with Chris McKinney. He’s the president of Brownstone International. The Portland-based company has filed for tariff refunds on behalf of dozens of businesses. Welcome to all three of you.

Jason Bolt: Thank you.

Darren Marshall: Thank you.

Chris McKinney: Thanks. Good to be here.

Miller: Jason, I wanna start with you. Can you tell us the story of how you started Revant?

Bolt: Yeah, I’m happy to. And first of all, thank you for having me on the show. It’s a real honor to be here, especially with these two I respect greatly.

Miller: I should say, I don’t remember the last time I saw this, as I was introducing all of you there were fist bumps between the three of you as I was saying your name.

Bolt: It’s a tight community here, we know each other well. Darren and I have been on a few panels together, so “Getting the band back together” is how we say it. Yeah, I started Revant out of my dorm room actually down at University of Oregon in 2010. I was attending school there doing a post-baccalaureate pre-med program. And I love mountain biking, wore Oakleys at the time, and inevitably would scratch the lenses in my Oakleys, and I would go to Oakley and Sunglass Hut and ask if I could just get replacement lenses. No one made them, and they’d ask for another 200 bucks for a pair of sunglasses and as a college student that was a large sum of money for me.

So I started doing some research online, Alibaba.com where you can find anything, found some factories that make sunglasses and asked them if they would just make lenses for me. Eventually, a few agreed to. I had them send me some samples. I put those up on eBay. That was about three months in and after about 48 hours, all 200 samples sold. So that was my seed money. Took that money and rolled it into more frames, more lenses, and since then, we’ve sold about 3.5 million pairs of lenses. We manufacture most of those now here in downtown Portland. We’ve launched our own eyewear line, so we’re growing and we love the community here.

Miller: It’s a classic founder story of seeing some problem just in your own life, coming up with a solution and realizing that that solution might actually bear fruit as a company for other people. Where do your raw materials come from? You said you’re manufacturing, but not everything. You’re importing things. So where are you getting those raw materials from and what are those raw materials?

Bolt: Yeah, like most U.S. based manufacturers, we do need to import raw materials because you can’t source them here. We source mainly from areas of China and Taiwan for our lens materials and frames. Like I mentioned, we just launched sunglasses in June of last year. So we bring those in monthly, and we have CNC routers here that we use to sort of do last mile manufacturing of the lenses, assembly of eyewear, so that’s currently where we get our product.

Miller: How many different tariff rates did you face over the last year and a half?

Bolt: I think we calculated six. So since Liberation Day, which was April, I think 26th of 2025, yeah, we’ve had six changes. We started 2025 at 9.5%, and that was carried from 2018, the first Trump administration through the Biden administration. And then in April, it went up to 29.5%, peaked in, let’s see, it was like a month in May or April at 144.5%. Held for a month, and has since come back down where we’re currently at 29.5%.

Miller: So still three times higher than it was at the beginning of the second term, but not nearly as high as the peak of overall 100%.

Bolt: Yeah, 144.5% at its peak and it held for a month. So we did have imports on the water at the time that were hit with that rate.

Miller: Darren, can you give us a sense for the kinds of products that you import as a tea maker?

Marshall: Yeah, so we, Steven Smith Teamaker, is an integrated tea manufacturer here in Southeast Portland, and we import 300 ingredients from 30 countries. Those tea materials come to our tea works in the Central Eastside of Portland, where under one roof, we formulate, we blend, we package, and we ship to consumers across the world. So most of those are black teas or green teas or whatever it might be together with other botanicals that come from different places.

Miller: And what’s the list of countries, even a sampling of the countries that you get most of your things from?

Marshall: So of the 300 ingredients from 30 countries, the top five ingredients come from Japan, China, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and those are the vast majority of the things that we require.

Miller: How high did tariffs get for you?

Marshall: They ranged. Like Jason, we maybe started with 8.5% with China, then got to 138.5% at one point, it bounced around a lot. On average, over the course of last year, our weighted average was about 25% across all of the goods that we import. The challenge wasn’t the amount, it was the changing of the amount and the volatility of that. What it caused for us as a team is, there’s a huge problem that is dropped on our laps, and we have to solve that. And then the problem changes, and we need to solve that problem. And then it changes again, and we need to solve that problem. So last year was very much a year of defense for our business instead of offense. It just took up so much time and energy and money and effort.

Miller: When I’ve looked at the backs of your products over the years, it’s very specific about what comes from where, proudly saying, this Darjeeling is this first flush from this part of India, say. How much are you able to switch the source countries for specific ingredients that you’ve been using in your recipes for blends for more than a decade in some cases?

Marshall: It’s very difficult. Our biggest challenge at one point was China, and can we get green teas from other places than China? And it’s a fundamental different taste profile for our consumers. And then it becomes the integrity of the brand. Do we change the product to something else for purely economic reasons, or are we staying true to the formulas that we know that are right for our consumers? And we chose not to do that. The mix of those products may have changed, maybe we push more of this and less of that, but fundamentally changing ingredients to change a product, purely because of economic reasons, we chose not to do.

Miller: Another option that businesses like both of yours have are to increase the price to consumers. If your costs go way up, and we’re just talking about tariffs, we haven’t even been talking about other aspects that could drive costs, inflation broadly or fuel costs recently, for example. But you could just say, hey, a box of teabags is gonna cost more, replacement lenses, Jason, are gonna cost more. How much did you do that, Jason, this year?

Bolt: So we try to keep that pretty minimal just to generally keep up with inflation, which as you mentioned, has also been high. So there’s a lot of pressure on consumers right now. Affordability is kind of the term that is out there, that nothing’s really affordable. So being a company that provides an alternative, a more affordable alternative to buying new eyewear and wanting our customers to have the ability to repair the eyewear they love is our goal. And so we have to really maintain price in order to drive the conversion in that story.

So we absorbed that cost. The tariff cost, I think in 2025 it was roughly $500,000 that we had not budgeted for in additional tariff costs directly to our business. We did not pass that on to customers. We just really raised prices for the sort of adjustment for inflation. So we absorbed those, and as Darren mentioned, every time the tariff rates were changed, we had to re-forecast, re-budget, slow down hiring, slow down investments in machinery, just so we could afford to absorb those and stay in an operationally healthy position.

Miller: And Darren, what about you?

Marshall: You know, for small businesses like all of ours, this sort of unanticipated cost increase is an existential threat. Thankfully, we are still in business, but I can only imagine the number of small new businesses, new entrepreneurs that when faced with a tidal wave of unexpected challenge, what might happen. We had to increase prices, but part of that was because of tariffs. Part of it, as Jason had mentioned, was because of other cost increases in the broader environment, and it’s a function of what’s going on in the world at the moment. And I think as we look forward with the impact of other political initiatives in the world at the moment, there’s gonna be huge cost increases with those elements as well.

Miller: There’s a lot more to talk about there. Chris, how many of your customers are seeking tariff refunds right now? The company is saying, hey, we’d like you to apply for this money that we spent that now the feds say we shouldn’t have collected.

McKinney: Sure, out of about probably 110 customers that are eligible, I think we’re at 98, so 95% of them have, even though we’ve reached out to all of them, not all of them have said yes, which boggles my mind a bit.

Miller: Oh, you mean because there are customers of yours who are leaving their money on the table?

McKinney: For now, yeah. I’m not sure. I can’t speak to why. And with the larger number, I can’t talk to each of them individually right now and say, hey, this is in essence your money you can have back with interest, which is a nice thing. The government is including a little bit of interest when it comes back.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the range of products that your customers brought in?

McKinney: I mean, you see tea here. We have everything from manufacturing products to tents that sit on the top of cars to raw materials. I mean, it is the broadest possible spectrum. China was hit, India was hit very hard, and so that’s going to encapsulate almost all the products you can imagine, right? It’s hard to list them all, would take everyone’s time, quite frankly.

Miller: OK, well, let me move on to another broad question which is what would you say is the average refund that your customers are seeking? How much money are we talking about?

McKinney: We don’t have huge customers, but it ranges from the million dollar range all the way down to people who are going to get just $4,000 or $5,000 back, right? So it’s an extremely broad range, and I want to touch on, when you said the impact on small companies. It was, I think, the final nail in the coffin for a couple of our customers, one had a multi-million dollar business and they just sold their inventory and walked away. Because they were not competitive and just the cash flow needed to survive something like this. You can’t raise prices because you’re competing against the multinationals that will eat the costs and push the small guy out of business.

Miller: So Walmart, say, is gonna find some way to survive, but some of your customers, and these are Northwest businesses, you’re saying your customers are out of business now because of tariffs.

McKinney: 100%, yeah. Shrinking or out of business, yeah. Or have sold, have taken a bath. I mean, the one company didn’t even sell ongoing operations. They sold inventory just to exit the business with something left. So it’s sad. It’s very, very hard to watch.

Miller: Can you describe the refund application project? This portal started about a month ago.

McKinney: The CAPE [Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries] Portal. Well, I will say for a government project it was finished on time. There’s your positive. It’s not as complicated as it could have been. I feared they’re a little reluctant to refund money. I thought they’d make it almost intentionally difficult. They didn’t and now that we’re starting actually to see, they said 16 to 90 days for refunds to come back, and some people have already received theirs. However, we found out, say, for an example, a customer had 35 eligible harmonized numbers or different products represented. Not all were refunded. And so they’re not clear on the algorithm used to refund the order. So we’re trying to look and do our own research.

Miller: Is it in other words, some of your customers, they’ve gotten partial refunds, and it’s not clear to them yet why?

McKinney: Yeah, it didn’t get refused because they say accepted, which they were, or refused, not gonna be paid. So they’re all accepted, but not refunded. So we’re trying to figure out what the reasoning behind it is.

Miller: Jason, the number that you mentioned earlier, that was $500,000 of tariff tariffs that you paid last year, more than what you had been budgeting for or expecting because of the increases. What might you have spent that money on?

Bolt: Well, we did have plans to invest in more machinery. Like, I’m very passionate about domestic manufacturing. I think making a product where you use it is the future, just period. And so investing in the machinery to do that, training for our key employees, to be able to not just operate the machinery but maintain it, which is critical. Other investments in innovative products, innovative materials, things that we wanna potentially actually source here so we can do everything here.

And then we’re also working with local universities on building a pipeline of talent, so we can prepare, through curriculum, students that then can fit right into jobs that we have here in Portland and just help build our community in that way. And so investments in that curriculum, that time we need to sort of potentially set up an eyewear and lens lab with them, things like that were all on the docket, and those are things because they’re further out, they’re investments in the future we had to pull back on, just to stay economically viable.

Miller: There is a deep and depressing irony in what you were just saying because one of the ostensible reasons for these tariffs – the government put forward a number of them. Some were just punishment, some had to do with fentanyl or various things that didn’t really make sense, but the one that theoretically made sense was we want more manufacturing on our shores, domestic manufacturing. But you’re saying that because you had to pay these tariffs, your efforts to actually do more manufacturing in the U.S., in Portland, were hampered.

Bolt: Absolutely. I mean, you’re honing in on what I think is misunderstood here about tariffs, in that they should be a last resort in any sort of economic negotiation, global trade scenario, and this is well understood by people in global trade that determine what sort of to do with the economic levers is you use tariffs last, because generally they’re not very effective in terms of driving more local manufacturing or business. In certain sectors that is, but when you talk about what’s happening now, I’ll just say we pay the tariffs and we being the companies and the consumers, it’s not our competitors. And so when we have to pay this cash out of our pocket, that cash cannot go towards growth of local domestic manufacturing and everything surrounding that. It’s a 10-year exercise to develop true manufacturing might. We gave it away in the ‘80s here, for cheaper labor.

Miller: So there’s the manufacturing piece and then there’s connected to that is just the materials piece. And so we were talking with Darren earlier about can you source some particular green tea if you have been getting it from China, can you get it from some other country that has a lower tariff rate this week or this month. What would it take to get those lens blanks, these lenses that that you’ll then carve, route into the particular shape you need for a frame? What would it take to source them domestically?

Bolt: Yeah, and that’s what gets me excited, just to be clear, is this idea of end to end sourcing, manufacturing, assembling, distributing, we can do that here again, but it’s more of a 10-year time horizon, curriculum, education, raw material. So our main raw material is polycarbonate, in which they use in like fighter jet canopies, things like that. And that would be, I think, the first material that we would look to actually process and make here, but we would need to partner with plastics manufacturers here in order to develop that. And then we have the coatings that go on that. So those are highly specialized mirror coatings and other things.

And so, that exercise in finding out can we source it here, can we process it here, can we apply it here is what we’re working on, but we had to pull back on that work to just, again, pay these tariffs. So, I’m optimistic about being able to do that, the raw materials that we need, can we source them here? I absolutely think so, but we have to build out the infrastructure partnerships and processes to do so.

Miller: Darren, what about you? What might you have spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars that your company spent on tariffs, if it hadn’t gone to those tariffs, what might you have done with it?

Marshall: Last year was a really difficult year for us. COVID was a difficult year. Last year was far more difficult than COVID because COVID was an issue that stayed the same for 12 or 18 months, and we needed to learn how to deal with it, and we did. With the tariffs last year, every month was a different flavor of challenge that we needed to rework and reinvest in. So it took a ton of time and energy and effort to be able to make that happen.

There was an economic element, and there was an opportunity cost element. So the economic piece costs us several $100,000 that we hadn’t planned on. And the way our business works is we import ingredients this year that we’re going to use next year.

Miller: Do they go bad?

Marshall: No.

Miller: I asked that because I’m wondering if this month it’s 25%, next month it’s 15%, then the month after 100%, the month after that it’s 15% or whatever, can you…

Marshall: That’s exactly the problem.

Miller: When do you buy the green tea leaves?

Marshall: Well, and what we learned, with the help of Chris, is how to delay the entry into the country, and what are the different tactics that one might be able to use to be able to avoid tariffs. And in our case, tea isn’t grown in America, so it’s not like we had a domestic substitute. We have to acquire our ingredients from these different environments. Back to your question, what would we have done? We had to cut our advertising spend, which then reduced our ability to reinvest in growth for the business. So our flywheel that dries everything slowed down and went into reverse. We weren’t able to compensate our people as well. We weren’t able to hire new people to be able to drive things.

Miller: Might you have hired more people?

Marshall: Of course. I mean, businesses like ours are small and growing, and the algorithm of how these things work is we continue to grow, we continue to reinvest. If you put a spanner in the works, then all of a sudden that growth engine stops or reverses, and you just lose a ton of momentum. Machinery, people, the future, that is what was prevented at Smith.

Miller: Chris, I’m curious about what Darren was just getting to there about, he worked with you and your team to figure out ways to not get around and then pay less in tariffs. So what were you doing? What can you legally do?

McKinney: Well, I mean, you can put it in a free trade zone, right? And then you extract it at the time that you’re gonna consume it and pay the duty at that time. So you can somewhat time your, when you pull your duties out, it’s a different set of costs and it takes time to set up, right? Or more difficult, yeah, I mean, once it’s shipped, it’s shipped. I mean that you’ve got something on the water in a vessel that’s gonna land, right? So you’re kind of locked in if you don’t have somewhere to put it that will delay duty, which in essence is a free trade zone or a zone where it hasn’t necessarily entered the commerce of the country, right? That’s your primary way to do that other than controlling the arrival.

Miller: One of the things I remember hearing about last year was people trying to get around these tariffs by saying, no, this is not a product from China. This product is from this other country. How much is that happening?

McKinney: Well, we’ve seen customers do that with a straight up…

Miller: Sort of put a different sticker on it.

McKinney: There you go.

Miller: You don’t want to say straight up lie, but is that what we’re talking about?

McKinney: I mean, not necessarily our customers, quite honestly, but you hear, directly they go to a term where the origin pays the duty, right? So a DDP term means that the supplier has agreed to pay everything to your door, including the duty. The danger with that is the overseas countries don’t care. They will misdeclare. They will lie about the product. They will lie about the country of origin, and you will in the end be liable or can in the end be liable. And that’s a strategy I’ve heard of, more than one company taking where they push back the payment kind of made offshore for the alleged duties that were paid. And it’s not an advisable strategy, but it’s certainly one that, desperate, desperate times, right?

Miller: I wanna play a voicemail that we got. This is from a listener named Ed Kraus who owns Kraus Music Products in Clackamas. All right, we’re gonna work on that tape. Ed Kraus is not white noise. He’s an actual human being. There’s something happening with our system right now. But Jason, I started by talking about the Supreme Court ruling, striking down sweeping tariffs, but they’re not the only tariffs that exist in the world. What’s happening right now?

Bolt: Yeah, so, IEEPA, or under the International Emergencies Economic Power Act, that was the original tariffs that were put in place were under that act, and there were two rationales for that. That was the drug and then the trade deficit was the other rationale. Those were struck down. The recent and sort of very quick follow up here has been 301. It’s an act, I think 1974 is when that was put in place. And those 301 tariffs are being worked on right now, and I think they could affect, I think, 90% of imported goods, and they’re expected to rule on that in July of this year. So we’re planning for that potential where those tariffs come roaring back. And given that they went back, they were at 144% at one point, we have to consider that that could be a reality this summer, which is our peak selling season.

Miller: Darren, what do you plan to do? Let’s assume that you do get the money back for this one set of tariffs. What do you plan to do with that money?

Marshall: So new news is this week we got our first payment, small tranche, so I’m happy about that, but it is suggesting that the system is working. I’m still very nervous about the future in that there’s, as we’ve all discussed, there’s a lot of other things going on. With the current war in the Middle East, freight costs are going up. Our packaging costs, much of which are oil-based, are going up. Fertilizers which are farmed in the Middle East then go to our origin countries are delayed or prices significantly going up. So there’s a lot of other factors in addition to potential new tariffs that come along.

Miller: And it seems like what you’re talking about, these are global supply chain price increases that could be embedded into the global economy for years. If you’re talking about fertilizer and then that’s going to go to, I don’t know, growing chamomile, and then you’ll get that chamomile two years from now, maybe.

Marshall: 100%. 100%. So all of these factors are creating volatility in the supply chain on a global basis and they’re all going to drop. It’s a question of when and how much, I don’t know.

Miller: Let’s try again to listen to a voicemail that came from Ed Kraus.

Ed Kraus: UPS is our customs broker and every time I ask them, are the refunds now gonna flow through you or do I have to go direct to customs, they say they don’t know and they’re waiting for guidance. On top of that, we have the new type of tariffs which are also illegal as per the International Trade Court, but the trade court did not put an injunction to prevent them from being collected, so not only do I not know if I’m ever going to get my money back, today I’m going to send thousands and thousands of still illegal tariff dollars to pay an invoice for a product shipment that I received after the court said that the next round is illegal.

Miller: So Chris, what’s he talking about there in terms of still having to pay tariffs that he says a court have deemed illegal?

McKinney: I think that’s Section 122 where it was a narrower decision and not as immediately accepted, but it was a narrower decision as to what the illegality and there was a certain state and products that were defined in that decision. And so there are more, there’s obviously so much ongoing litigation. I wouldn’t pretend to know about all of it, right? So that’s quite a bit different than the sweeping decision that was made regarding the IEEPA tariffs. Yeah.

Miller: Chris, Jason, and Darren, thanks so much.

Bolt: Thank you.

McKinney: All right, thank you.

Marshall: Thanks for having us.

Miller: Chris McKinney is the president of Brownstone International. Jason Bolt, founder and CEO of Revant Optics, and Darren Marshall is the CEO of Steven Smith Teamaker.

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