May 2025 Tariff Update

UPDATE; 26 May: Nominally 72 hours after the president announced a threat of 50% tariffs on the EU to begin 1 June, he has announced he is delaying them until 9 July. The uncertainty created by these constantly changing positions is making it exceptionally difficult to judge what to communicate to our customers and how to manage and order from our vendors. The NOCH TL;DR below has been updated to reflect this latest circumstance. Thank you for your support.

This morning (23 May) the president announced that as early as next week he may instate new 50% tariffs on the EU. If you did not read our previous overview announcement please do.

See also our September 2025 update.

Here’s the To Long, Didn’t Read version of this update for everyone, more details are below.

Details

Presumably you’re reading this amongst other similar updates from companies like Catalyst Game Labs regarding tariffs and price increases or impacts to product availability based on the existing tariffs on the EU and China that were instated in the last 60-90 days. The Wargaming Company has similarly begun to encounter new impacts including as of this morning. So here is a general overview of where things stand, as of this morning 23 May 2025.

If you haven’t read the overview we posted of why and how we expect tariffs to impact our business, you can find that here. It is a good contextual primer for the following.

Book Costs & Prices

TL;DR: No price change yet, costs anticipated to increase substantially, price increase is likely yet this year.

We print books in fairly large runs, i.e. one print run is generally estimated to cover a handful of years of sales depending on the title. We do this instead of print-on-demand in order to achieve the profit margin needed to be able to sell our titles to resellers as well as to offer them at the retail price points we do. This provides us some insulation against cost increases as well, since in year two of a title’s release the book we sell does not cost us any more than the one we sold year one. However, eventually we need to pay for a new title to be printed, or we need to reprint a previous title, and in order to have the capital necessary for that expenditure, we have to raise prices on existing stock.

Currently we have requested pricing information from our print partners for our next title – which is tentatively scheduled for next year but we need to get some idea of how much prices have already risen and how soon we will need to raise prices on our existing books in order to allow us to afford to print our next one.

ESR Miniatures Packs

TL;DR: Minor components have increased 30-45% in cost, major components no cost increase yet. Price increases are unfortunately coming.

So far we have not experienced a price increase for miniatures, however, the production material, mold material, and master material all come from outside the US: Mexico, the EU, and China. So we expect all of them to be hit at some unknown point.

Our miniatures aren’t the only things in our ESR Miniatures Packs. Cards, bases, and even packaging are being hit by tariff driven cost increases. Our cards are printed in the US but as noted before, the raw materials come from Canada and China. This spring we absorbed a 45% price increase on our card decks. Obviously the next one we will have to raise prices for.

The raw material for the MDF bases we include in our ESR Miniatures Packs is no longer readily available. After spending a couple weeks trying to track down alternative sources of double-faced (or double-tempered) 1/8″ (3mm) MDF from different distributors we learned that this was previously products by two companies in the US. One of which closed and the other of which was purchased by a Canadian company. Depending on what region of the US you are located in, the product can still be obtained more or less readily but prices have increased significantly (+100% in Minnesota) while availability has reduced. The two suppliers we were able to find the product from have instated minimum order volumes that amount to what we estimate would take us 7-10 years to consume, and that was at double the price we paid just four months ago. We can still get single-faced MDF which is rough on one side and smooth on the other instead of smooth on both, but its cost has increased 30%.

Packaging costs are bouncing all over currently. We have ample stock at the current moment and due to the high volatility don’t know if they will be a further cost driver soon or not, we just have to wait and see.

NOCH Trees & Terrain Supplies

TL;DR: President threatened 50% tariffs on EU this morning (23 May) and so NOCH restocks are on indefinite hold. Price increases on current stock likely. SEE 26 MAY UPDATE ABOVE.

We were compelled to increase prices on NOCH products in March for the first time ever. This was due to reaching the limit of what we could absorb of past supplier price increases with bad timing for a large restock order arriving from Germany being hit by import tariffs.

We currently have a request into NOCH for another large restocking order to provide for Historicon 2025 as well as the rest of calendar 2025. However, as the president announced that as early as next week he may levy new 50% tariffs on the EU, we are placing our order on hold. We simply can not absorb anything similar to a 50% tariff on NOCH products, nor do we expect that our customers who are used to paying $1.00-1.50 per tree would be willing to suddenly pay substantially more.

We’re also weighing an additional price increase on our current on-hand stock of NOCH products so that if the 50% tariffs are avoided we can afford to restock at whatever presumably higher cost they will settle into.