New Jersey “Rinseroo” entrepreneur says tariffs are “literally business-busting”

A New Jersey entrepreneur who built her company from the ground up is worried about the impact tariffs are going to have on her business. 

From her basement in Millstone Township, Lisa Lane taught herself how to create a product, manufacture it in China, and sell it exclusively online. 

“I was at the Jersey Shore, I was bathing my dogs and cleaning my shower walls with a bucket, and I thought, ‘There’s gotta be a better way.’ And then right there in the shower is where the concept of Rinseroo came to be,” Lane said. 

The Rinseroo is a slip-on shower hose. It sold so well online that Lane’s son joined the business, and now they have a line of almost a dozen products. After five years in business and three attempts to get on their dream show, they finally made it on “Shark Tank.” 

“Getting onto ‘Shark Tank’ is like getting into Harvard, right? It’s not easy,” Lane said. 

Sales took off – some 200,000 units a year. 

“Just like so many American dreams happen – it starts in the driveway, it starts in the basement,” Lane said. 

“It is literally business-busting”

But then tariffs hit. 

“When we started in 2019, it was about 12% … And then when Trump was being elected or running for office, we thought maybe 25% – I could still absorb that. But now at 145%? It is literally business-busting,” Lane said. 

She looked into manufacturing in the United States. She found that just one part of her product which costs 40 cents when made in China would cost $5 to make in the United States.

“The new tariff adds like $6 per unit to my bottom line. When I calculate and multiply $6 times 200,000 units, zero is left,” Lane said. 

Her manufacturer even considered moving production out of China. 

“To Cambodia, but they said the cost of goods will go up 30%. At the moment, there’s a hold on tariffs in Cambodia, but potentially a 49% tariff. So am I any better off going there?” Lane said. 

“There’s a lot of collateral damage”

She’s also worried about all the manufacturing relationships she has built. 

“There’s really a lot of collateral damage from it,” she said. “I actually feel bad for people in China, too.” 

Right now, she has inventory stuck in Shanghai that she can’t afford to ship because of the new extra cost when it lands. 

“A lot of companies, from what I understand, their products get to the port, they can’t afford to pay it, and it sits there, or they have to store it for a couple hundred dollars a day, to hope that the tariffs go down, or they abandon it,” Lane said. “It’s just not sustainable. What do we do? I don’t know.” 

Lane is hoping the Trump administration rolls tariffs back before Rinseroos are priced out past their limit.