Nearly 80% of U.S. toys still made in China
WS Game Company’s made-in-America experiment nearly fails to pass go
WS Game Company CEO Jonathan Silva decided to test whether a profitable board game could be made in the United States after he received a seven-figure tariff bill last year on games manufactured in China, where the company produces most of its high-end products.
He chose to produce a special edition of Monopoly themed to the country’s 250th birthday. But the experiment immediately hit a problem: no U.S. company was willing or able to make 10,000 dice.
“We turned over every single leaf trying to find someone who would make 10,000 dice for us in the U.S.,” Silva said in an interview with NPR. “It requires special machinery. It requires investment. And that type of stuff just can’t happen on a random Tuesday and be ready in a couple of months.”
Silva ultimately had to settle for imported dice. He was able to find domestic suppliers for the rest of the game’s components — a former Hasbro factory in Massachusetts prints the Monopoly board, Pioneer Packaging makes the money tray, and a business in Indiana, Stateline Industries, fabricated custom metal tokens with shapes including a cowboy hat, covered wagon and apple pie.
But assembling all those suppliers took more than a year, causing Silva to miss the first half of the 250th birthday selling season. The total manufacturing cost for the games, which retail at $80, was at least double what production in China would have cost.
“When I place a purchase order in China, they have all those capabilities under one roof,” Silva said. “For one item, it took up way too much of our resources and time to bring it to market.”
Nearly 80% of all toys and games sold in the United States are made in China, according to the Toy Association, an industry trade group. The country has spent decades developing an integrated factory ecosystem that can supply both finished products and every specialized component.
Greg Ahearn, the Toy Association’s president and CEO, said moving production back to the U.S. is not as straightforward as it sounds.
“That’s why the re-shoring and the looking at bringing it back into the U.S. or even looking at other countries and moving it is not as easy as it sounds,” Ahearn said.
Ahearn argued that while it makes sense for the United States to manufacture some strategically important products, toys and games — which carry low prices and low profit margins — are not likely candidates.
“Even if you could, who in their right mind would take their capital and invest it into creating a toy manufacturing plant?” Ahearn said. “Of all the things you could pick, we’d probably be pretty low on that list.”
The toy industry is instead lobbying for a tariff carve-out. The new U.S.-China Board of Trade is considering allowing up to $30 billion worth of Chinese products to enter the U.S. tariff-free, but toys are competing with shoes, apparel and many other products for the tax break.
As MSI previously reported, businesses across multiple industries have struggled with the uncertainty created by trade policy. Silva is now awaiting a shipment from China of about $6 million worth of games for the upcoming holiday season, with no firm idea of what the tariff bill will be.
“We’re really good at a lot of great things here in America,” Silva said. “But we’re not really great at making certain items that are consumable goods. And that’s OK.”