We don’t often wade into politics - but last week, we were hit with something that made it impossible to ignore.
One of our most cherished remakes is the Concorde Pendant Light. These aren’t just any fixtures - the originals were salvaged from the Concorde hangar at Heathrow Airport back in the 2010s. That’s where their name and their legacy comes from.
When we decided to remake them, it wasn’t about mass production. It was about honouring a design, preserving history, and doing it right. We held back a couple of the originals so we could rebuild them - modernising carefully, preserving the essence, and improving what we could. That’s the Trainspotters way: every remake must be at least as good as the original, if not better.
One key component - the lower ring that holds the prismatic shade and binds the whole unit - proved difficult to replicate locally. UK made samples proved unviable. The material quality was inconsistent, the process slow and inefficient, the tooling and unit costs eye-waveringly high. After lots of trial and error, we found an efficient and responsive manufacturer in China who got it exactly right. High-quality and beautifully made at a significantly lower cost. So yes, we outsourced - because we care about the result, not just the optics and we’re in a global economy after all, aren’t we?!
Then came the sting.
Our latest shipment of rings landed in the UK last week. Standard customs procedures, no drama - until we got “pinged” by HMRC: a massive 30% tariff on the components required immediate payment.
The justification? An “anti-dumping duty” imposed on goods sold in the UK at prices significantly lower than their normal value in the exporter's home market, aiming to protect domestic industries from unfair competition. But in our case? Completely misplaced.
This is not an import duty. It’s a protectionist tariff. A penalty essentially, imposed on us by HMRC for having the audacity to source high-quality parts from China. But we are not shipping in dodgy goods that we’ll just bosh out at pence per unit. We’ve spent months prototyping. We place small, carefully considered orders. We don’t waste. We don’t throw away. We’re a small, design-focused British company, not a faceless big box retailer cramming containers with fast fashion.
But none of that mattered. There was no appeals process. No human to explain things to. Just a bill - and a choice: pay up or don’t get the goods.
We’ve never even heard of this tariff and we’ve imported several times before. We are really shocked that this anti-dumping tariff is actually everything that one of Trumps tariffs seems to be. And we wonder how many companies like us know it even exists?
It is a protectionist tariff presented as a way of protecting our domestic market, but we wonder how much of the revenue raised from this tariff actually goes towards supporting domestic manufacture?
It reminds us a lot of something we’re seeing across the pond with Trump’s trade war. One of the hallmarks of his presidency is slapping tariffs on Chinese imports to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. But it’s small businesses - craft producers, startup makers, independent manufacturers - who are feeling the squeeze the most. They’re not the ones offshoring entire supply chains. But they’re the ones who are footing the bill.
The same thing is happening here. It’s easier for governments to go after companies like ours than confront the real culprits. One pallet of high-grade, pressed aluminium parts gets tariffed into oblivion, while tons of throwaway products slide through the cracks every week.
We are firm believers in supporting the UK manufacturing industry, and we do so with the majority of our products. But we are also supporters of a global economy, believing that international interaction through trade is a force for good. We are genuinely shocked that we have been subjected to this protectionist tariff. It damages indiscriminately, punishing the thoughtful, the meticulous, the responsible.
So yes, this was a painful one. But it’s opened our eyes to a larger reality—a trade environment where intentions don’t count, and nuance gets flattened in the name of policy. We’ve paid the bill but we will be forced to rethink our sourcing. It just makes it increasingly expensive to keep doing what we do best: making things that last, and making them well.
Trainspotters: Lighting for life, with or without the tariffs.
