I paid my customers back for tariffs. My business has been on the phone with Customs trying to get our refund.

• Dame Products cofounder Alexandra Fine added a Trump surcharge last year for tariff costs.
• In 2026, she reimbursed customers for the fees after the Supreme Court ruled against many of Trump's tariffs.
• Her business is pursuing its own refund through the US Customs portal, which opened in April.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Alexandra Fine, cofounder of Dame Products, a sexual wellness brand that was affected by Trump's tariff policies. US Customs and Border Protection opened a refund portal on Monday, allowing importers to file for tariff refunds. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

My cofounder, Janet Lieberman, and I started Dame in 2014 as a female-founded vibrator brand.

We launched a funding campaign on Indiegogo, raising $575,000 in 45 days, and have since grown the business. We sell directly on our website and at major retailers like Walmart and Target.

Part of our supply chain was in the US at first, but it was very expensive because we shipped everything to China for final assembly, and tariffs on imports from China were really high. China is excellent at making silicon molds, which are a really important part of how we make vibrators and are hard to find anywhere else, so we moved all production there.

When tariffs started increasing last year, some of my founder friends were able to source materials from Vietnam or Mexico, but shifting production wasn't a practical option for us.

The post-Liberation Day scramble

On Liberation Day, when Trump held up the sign with all the tariff rates, we were scrambling.

We had inventory coming in that was suddenly going to cost us 50% more than we thought. We had to redo our inventory forecasting, and that took time. Then, two days later, the tariffs went up again.

The high costs meant we had some weeks when we were out of stock and lost out on possible sales.

It was a nightmare and stressful for my relationships with Target, Walmart, and the other retailers I sell to. Many companies require 90 days to change prices, so we couldn't quickly adjust to offset our higher costs.

We ended up adding a Trump tariff surcharge to orders on our website, which was kind of a consumer education marketing campaign for us.

The concept got us publicity, but ultimately led to huge cart abandonment. It turns out folks don't like getting to checkout to find they're being charged more for the product than they thought they'd be, which was our whole point because that was our experience with tariffs. The $5 to $15 we were charging also wasn't enough to fully cover the tariffs.

After about two weeks, we made an update so customers would see the charge, but it would be crossed out, meaning they wouldn't have to pay it.

I think, had we raised our prices, we wouldn't have seen so much cart abandonment because most people wouldn't have realized the prices were higher. But we really wanted to call it out.

We made up our minds early to repay the surcharge

As we waited for a Supreme Court decision on tariffs earlier this year, we assumed that if they were overturned, there would be a refund.

So we planned to automatically repay everyone who had paid us for the Trump surcharge. It wasn't a huge amount anyway — we gave back less than $10,000 altogether within a few weeks of the court decision.

I don't know if people really noticed the refund. We don't show up as Dame Products, a sex toy company, on a credit card bill. We are more discreet on your statement, so I wonder if people who didn't catch the email saw it.

Still, the people who did notice it and saw the messaging were really positive.

Because we charged the fee separately, it was easy for us to automatically give people the money back. It made us ask, why can't the government make its system automatic?

We're looking to get a $90,000 refund for our business, and so far, the rebate process with Customs has been frustrating.

Our refund process is off to a rocky start

Right now, we're having trouble logging in to the portal, which is the first step to making a claim. Our customs broker uses this portal all the time, but we haven't logged in over five years.

We tried calling tech support, and our operations person was on hold for over five hours on Wednesday before being disconnected. The day before that, it was three and a half hours, and then they disconnected her.

Finally, at 2:30 a.m on Friday, she got a call back. It didn't fix the issue, but it's progress.

We're a really small team, so $90,000 is a huge amount for us.

We had been working on reducing our overhead before the tariffs hit, but they basically wiped out that progress.

We're not stopping, though, because I really believe in what we're doing, and I think that the offering we make matters in the world to improve sexual well-being for women.

Editor's note: A US Customs spokesperson did not immediately have a comment on the login issue, but said they were looking into it.

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