The anxiety capital of the interior design industry? Memphis, Tennessee. There, alongside Elvis’s estate and Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, you can find the FedEx World Hub, a 940-acre logistics engine attached to the Memphis International Airport. There, 13,000 employees have the capacity—in normal times—to process 484,000 packages an hour. At the moment, the World Hub is also home to an unknown but extremely frustrating number of fabric samples, doorknobs and vases, all stuck in limbo. These are not normal times.
Recently an interior designer told me that Memphis has almost become a meme in her firm—a shorthand for a mysterious problem with no clear solution. Painter didn’t show up for the job? He must be in Memphis.
To be fair, it’s not just FedEx, and it’s not just Memphis. The logistics network that allows small parcels to enter the U.S. from abroad has been under severe strain recently across the board, a downstream effect of changes to trade regulations mostly made during the president’s Hot Tariff Summer. But these aren’t the big upholstery or cabinetry tariffs, nor the 100 percent–plus duties on China that sent the stock market tumbling.
Ironically, while the big “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs have grabbed the biggest headlines, their effect is relatively simple to process. Brands crunch the numbers and put out a price, designers bring it to their clients, and a decision is made. It’s the seemingly smaller changes to what’s known as the de minimis exemption that have proved to be a persistent destabilizer, leading to delays and uncertainty.
The de minimis exemption—the only trade regulation that sounds like the title of a spy thriller—was first instituted in the 1930s. The concept was simple: Customs officers were overwhelmed by having to examine every shipment into the country; by allowing low-value packages to come in uninspected and untariffed, the regulation aimed to save money in the long run by eliminating the need to hire more customs officers. Over time, the “low-value” threshold fluctuated—in 2016 it went up to $800 (from $200)—but the basic principle stayed the same.
De minimis had plenty of critics. It allowed companies like Shein and Temu to “hack” the system and flood the U.S. market with ultracheap goods by shipping them directly to customers from a network of Chinese factories, tariff-free. Dupe culture is partially downstream of de minimis. There’s also evidence that the exemption contributed to the flood of fentanyl and its precursors into the U.S. (though exactly how much is under debate).
A desire to tighten the loophole has had support on both sides of the aisle—Joe Biden advocated for aggressive changes to the regulation in the final year of his administration. But Donald Trump took the ball and sprinted with it. His administration has eliminated de minimis swiftly and completely.
The changes began near the start of the year, as the administration proposed new rules tightening the labeling requirements for low-value shipments. Before, importers were allowed to roughly classify what was in their packages (simply by writing “fabric sample,” for instance). Going forward, they would have to include what’s known as an HTS code, a number that pegs the product to a designation in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule.
This sounds simple, but it isn’t. The U.S. government’s product codes can be almost comically precise. For example, 5905.00.10 refers to textile wallcoverings backed with permanently affixed paper, while 5905.00.90, just one digit away, applies to textile wallcoverings backed by other means. If you make a slight mistake in filling out the form—or if an employee at FedEx doesn’t know their wallcoverings—the shipment can get stuck in Memphis for further review or even returned to sender.
In late August, after some back-and-forth over the summer, the Trump administration formally closed the de minimis exemption, meaning that any packages of any value—from 8 cents to $800 on up—would be inspected and tariffed. Almost overnight, the 3.8 million small parcels that enter the country every day required complex processing.
What followed was chaos. More than 30 national post offices from across the world—as well as giant carriers like DHL—suspended shipments to the U.S. as they reeled from the volume. Some have since resumed, but the international logistics network is still digesting the change, and for those who import a lot of stuff, the last two months have been full of delays, lost packages and uneven implementation of tariffs.
While putting a tariff on de minimis shipments is ostensibly about money, for the home industry, the cost has mostly been time. It’s rarely an issue for a designer’s clients to absorb the additional tariffs that accumulate on small-dollar shipments, but the uncertainty around when things come in has become a persistent headache.
“I ordered some leather material from London specifically for a client meeting in Boston,” says New York designer Garrow Kedigian. “I had expedited FedEx shipping, but of course, it sat in customs for three days, so it arrived at the client’s house after the meeting, and then they got this bill for the customs and duties on the shipment for the samples. It’s a little ridiculous.”
Samples in particular are a pain point. While many European textile and wallcovering companies have robust operations in the U.S., most maintain inventory in their native countries. That means that anytime a U.S. designer requests a CFA, it comes off of a bolt of fabric that’s warehoused in Europe. To make it through FedEx, the swatch now needs documentation, including its own HTS code, and, despite having little-to-no commercial value on its own, is charged a tariff.
“These are literally 3-by-5 snippets of fabric in a pouch. It gets to customs and they’re like, ‘We need the dimensions, we need a description, we need a 10-digit HTS code, we need the country of origin, and we need a tariff,’ for each CFA,” says Stephane Silverman, the founder of fabric brand Castel, and the U.S. distributor for European houses Güell Lamadrid and Les Créations de la Maison. “Then it gets caught into an administrative vortex. … Samples get held up for days—sometimes we send duplicates and the second shipment makes it through before the first one.”
Fiona West, president of North America for Pierre Frey, has also seen de minimis delays gum up the works. “We’re all installing the new fall collections, and everyone’s racing to get the new stuff to the showrooms and in the hands of the reps—and it’s hurry hurry hurry, and then things get stuck in Memphis for a month,” she says. “People have been really patient about tariffs and changes to the regulations, but I sense they’re starting to lose patience.”
A duty on a fabric sample—which likely costs the government more to collect than it earns from the tariff—is an absurdity of the current moment, but it’s not the only one. Because of the rapid-fire implementation of new de minimis rules, there’s widespread confusion about how and when to properly apply them. Designer Timothy Corrigan says that the sudden rollout doesn’t feel “systematic.”
“We ordered a wastebasket from Europe. Whatever duty the shipper wanted was more than the cost of the product. So, we just had to say, ‘Keep it,’” he says. “We wrote it off. But it’s getting really difficult to source from abroad.”
Corrigan is not the only designer to suggest that specifying product from overseas has become newly cumbersome (on the flip side, Kedigian says that European sellers, keenly aware that the new rules are an obstacle, are more willing to make deals). A few months into this new reality, it’s hard to make any long-term predictions as to whether the end of de minimis will make the design industry less global—but it’s a possibility.
A certainty: For now, everyone has a lot more busywork on their plates, and stress is running high. “You’re getting very frustrated reps who are like, ‘My customer’s in a hurry—where’s my package?’” says Silverman. “You used to be able to get this through in 48 hours; now we preemptively track things, because everything is getting stopped even though all the appropriate paperwork is put in. We contact FedEx, four days later they ask for descriptions of everything, we have to go through each CFA … It can take hours. It’s a lot of work and a lot of time for really nothing. These are snippets of fabric.”
The good news? Most analysts predict that the de minimis shock is temporary, and that, though the costs may never go down, the speed of global shipping will eventually pick back up. Here’s hoping. Until then, all eyes on Memphis.
Additional reporting by Haley Chouinard.