Here comes the tariff: Brides are scrambling as wedding gowns get caught in Trump’s trade war

• Trump's tariffs on China could mean higher prices for wedding dresses.
• Some 90% of wedding gowns are made in China.
• David's Bridal says it's working to shift production outside China to avoid the added costs.

As if planning a wedding wasn't already stressful enough, President Donald Trump's trade war could make it even pricier to say "I do."

The Trump administration has issued a combined 145% tariff on many imports from China, where the vast majority of wedding dresses are produced.

That means the average wedding dress — which retails for about $2,000, according to a survey by The Knot, a wedding planning site — could end up more than twice as expensive if retailers pass the additional costs down to the consumer.

Bridal retailers told Business Insider that the tariffs have been a huge disruption to their industry. The National Bridal Retailers Association, which represents over 6,000 independent brick-and-mortar bridal stores around the United States, said as many as 90% of bridal gowns are produced in China.

"The overriding feeling is despair," Angie Oven, a bridal shop owner and president of the NBRA, told BI after a meeting she held with 75 of the group's members. "There's a little bit of PTSD right now because a lot of us really just recovered from COVID."

Oven, who owns The Bridal Gallery in Salem, Oregon, said shops are working closely with manufacturers to find solutions. The group is also appealing to lawmakers to push for bridal gowns to be added to a tariff exemption list.

"Our No. 1 goal is to be removed from the tariff list," Sandra Gonzalez, vice president of NBRA and owner of Sparkle Bridal Couture in Sacramento, said.

Although Americans often associate China with cheap goods, bridal shop owners said the quality of dresses produced in China at scale is remarkable, from the lace to the boning to the sometimes 10,000 beads handsewn onto the gowns.

"We do not have the infrastructure to produce the quality of goods that brides are demanding of us," Gonzalez said. "To build the factories and train the people, that would take a whole generation."

Price increases and uncertainty

Alicia Adams, owner of Her's Bridal & Special Occasion in Minden, Louisiana, said the price of gowns is already going up. Some manufacturers are raising the wholesale price of gowns by as much as 30%, while others are, at least for now, trying to absorb the cost.

"Now that it's over 100%, obviously those manufacturers and designers aren't able to absorb those costs," she told BI. "They're going to have to pass it down to us, which means we would have to pass it down to our brides."

Adams said some bridal stores might try to absorb the costs, but at the current tariff rate, it likely won't be feasible. Some might instead absorb 50% and then pass the other half on to shoppers.

Complicating the situation is that many bridal gowns are made-to-order, meaning some brides have already picked out and paid for dresses now being produced abroad. When those gowns are delivered, they could be hit with a huge tariff for which the bride or the bridal shop never planned.

Vanessa Gerstner, whose wedding is this September in Italy, told BI she's waiting for a dress she ordered in November to arrive from Australia — where tariffs on imported goods are 10%.

"I'm hoping that I won't get another huge charge on top of what I've already paid, but since it is being shipped directly to me and not a bridal salon, I think, from my understanding, I would have to eat that cost," she said.

She said the additional fee "isn't terrible," especially compared to other brides who are now opting for cheaper dresses than they originally planned due to the increased tariff costs.

Bridal consultant Alina Garza, who works at One Bridal in Annapolis, Maryland, said in a video posted to TikTok last week that dress designers have already reached out to her to say they'll be raising prices by up to 20%. Two are US designers that source fabric from India and China, she later told BI by direct message.

One commenter said she was "not able to sleep over this" and planned to have items from China shipped to Mexico, where she would pick them up. Another said the factory making her dress has paused all shipments.

Shifting production out of China

Trump has said one of his motivations for the tariffs is to encourage more manufacturing in the United States. But while big bridal companies are considering shifting production out of China, they aren't necessarily looking at the United States.

Kelly Cook, CEO of David's Bridal, the largest wedding retailer in the United States, told BI that the company is not "tariff-proof" but "tariff-resilient," in part because it has 36 design and production facilities around the world, including in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Myanmar.

In anticipation of tariffs, the company has been proactively shifting its production out of China over the past few months. Cook said the company has lowered its China-based production from 50% of its total just several months ago to 30% today.

The company is also working to help its partners, who primarily manufacture dresses in China, shift production to their facilities in countries that haven't been hit quite as hard by tariffs.

As of Friday, Cook said David's Bridal had not raised prices. "We want to do everything in our power not to pass anything on to the customer," she told BI.

The smaller bridal shops said they were also working with their manufacturers to avoid passing on costs to brides, but the longer the high tariffs remain, the harder that will be. Still, they said many bridal shops now have plenty of gowns in store that brides could take home, free of tariffs.

Adams, who owns the shop in Louisiana, said it's still too soon to tell how severe the impact will be and that she didn't want to cause fear among brides. "We don't want to freak people out and then a month later everything goes back to normal," she said.

Still, Adams is also concerned that if tariffs do raise prices, it could deter brides from visiting their local brick-and-mortar bridal stores, many of which are longtime fixtures on their local main street.

"We hope people in Washington will give a little," she said. "They don't want people to not get married and not celebrate life moments."