As the Trump administration advances a trade war with global consequences, the Kun Shoulder Rest factory in the Canadian capital does not immediately stand out as the front line.
A family-owned business that operates out of a labyrinthine Victorian home in downtown Ottawa, Kun makes ergonomic shoulder rests used by violinists from New York to Berlin.
“We’re operating in this rarefied world of mostly orchestral stringed instruments,” said Juliana Farha, 58, the company’s director. “If you play the violin, you know about it. And if you don’t, it’s just some weird widget that you’ve never heard of.”
Yet that widget is among the countless products facing the prospect of tariffs crafted by the Trump administration in the name of boosting American industrial fortunes. Even before any tariffs take effect, company managers are scrambling to configure backup plans. The disruption highlights the interconnected effects of trade conflicts, a primary source of worry about the global economy.
The 25 percent tariffs that President Trump has threatened to impose on Canadian imports imperils Kun’s sales in the United States, the destination for more than a third of its products. The retaliatory levies the Canadian government might impose this week risk increasing the costs for one of its primary ingredients, a specialty nylon made by an American company.
“We would be hit with a double whammy,” Ms. Farha said.
What is hardest for her to accept is who stands to benefit from the upheaval. Not an American brand that might gain a bigger share of the market, but rather Chinese companies that produce crude imitations of Kun’s products, often at half the price. Her lone American competitor makes its products in Taiwan.
“That’s the idiocy of the whole thing,” she said. “There is no shoulder rest made in the United States that I’m aware of. There’s a huge market for Chinese copies.”
Ms. Farha had not envisioned spending her time contemplating the implications of tariffs. Her company was started by her stepfather, a violin maker who arrived in Ottawa as part of an exodus of émigrés from his native Czechoslovakia after the suppression of the Prague Spring in the late 1960s. Initially, he made his living repairing stringed instruments for musicians at the National Arts Center, a performing arts organization. By the early 1970s, he had a patented version of the shoulder rest.
The business grew largely on the promise of international trade, through arrangements with distributors in Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Germany and Austria.
Across the United States, music schools generated sales. A North American regional trade agreement allowed Kun to ship its products across the border free of duties.
Mr. Trump took direct aim at that arrangement on the first day of his new term, threatening tariffs of 25 percent on all imports from Canada. By early February, he had paused those measures, citing a reiteration of promises from the Canadian government to take a harder look at border security, and especially the flow of fentanyl.
But on March 4, Mr. Trump briefly followed through on the across-the-board Canadian tariffs before quickly exempting products deemed compliant with the terms of the North American trade agreement he signed with much fanfare during his first term. Its terms permit duty-free sales of goods that use specified minimum percentages of parts and raw materials made within the region.
That spared Kun’s shoulder rests, which are made in Canada with materials almost entirely from within the region. But it left Ms. Farha nursing a bad case of the worries about what might come next.
“These threatened 25 percent tariffs, which would cover our products, would be catastrophic for us,” she said. “It’s a nightmare.”
Her largest American wholesaler recently told her that the Trump administration’s tariffs planned for Wednesday appear unlikely to cover Kun’s products. But why, exactly, and what rationale will prevail going forward are questions without satisfying answers. All seems subject to change at the whim of a famously impulsive American president.
“I haven’t been able to figure out myself what now has a reprieve,” Ms. Farha said.
And even if the next wave of tariffs out of Washington leaves her shoulder rests untouched, the retaliatory tariffs outlined by the Canadian government could force her to pay 25 percent more for key parts.
All of which makes her eager to line up alternatives.
She found a nylon supplier in Europe, but it will sell her nothing less than a full shipping container’s worth, what is for Kun a five-year supply. That would fill the warehouse while forcing the company to front extra costs.
Kun buys its packaging from a Canadian supplier, but the paper comes from the United States. There, too, Ms. Farha is scouting out alternatives.
In recent weeks, her 10 employees have been starting work two hours earlier and laboring on weekends to amass inventory that can be shipped to the United States before any tariffs take effect. Whenever that is.
“The sword of Damocles is hanging over our head,” Ms. Farha said. “The issue for us is uncertainty. That is the toxin from my point of view.”
