STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

Ketchum entrepreneurs Nick Harman and Casey Finegan put in hours of hard work over the past five years to create a menagerie of plush toys like a zebra-kangaroo combination known as Zangaroo.

Their line of toys and its accompanying book championed the idea that it’s okay to be different with the message, “What makes us different makes all the difference in the world.”

The two hit paydirt earlier this year when their toys went viral following a TikTok and Instagram post by a social influencer in the United Kingdom that garnered 33 million views. And their phones began blowing up with orders from around the world, in addition to those they were already selling on Amazon and in Ripley’s Believe It or Not stores.

Then the Trump Administrations tariff wars began.

Harman, who had entrusted China with the manufacture of the toys due to the availability of plush materials there, was suddenly looking at having to pay $145,000 more in tariffs to get them to the United States, in addition to the $100,000 bill he had already paid.

Harman said he didn’t have the money—he hasn’t taken any money from sales. But his cause was taken up by CNN this past week as news show host Erin Burnett piled three of his toys on her desk in front of economics analysts Peter Tuchman, a stock trader at the New York Stock Exchange who is known as the Einstein of Wall Street, and Dan Ives, a senior equity research analyst.

He’s sitting with $100,000 worth of goods that he’s paid but it’ll cost him $245,000 to get them onto the container ship, and it’s not happening, she told the men.

If he were to pay the additional fee, it’s likely the consumers would end up paying the tariff, the economists acknowledged.

And how much time until the damage is done and the entire transaction disrupted? Burnett asked.

Three weeks they added.