He runs a family business. He wants to follow the rules. It isn’t easy

Randy Carr watched the news on his laptop the way you look at a doctor about to administer a shot – nervously and braced for pain. It was April 2, and President Donald Trump was in the Rose Garden about to unveil new tariffs.

An upbeat, slightly jacked 52-year-old, Carr is CEO of World Emblem, a privately held company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that produces about 150 million embroidered patches a year, most of which end up on shirts and hats. He radiates so much energy that even sitting down, he appears to be set on vibrate.

His father started World Emblem in 1990, with two machines in a warehouse in a suburb of Miami. The company’s fortunes were improving by the time it opened a factory in Mexico, in 2005. Today, that operation is the size of eight football fields and employs more than 800 people. In a typical week, it produces about 2.5 million emblems.

There is $40 million worth of equipment in the plant, a major investment that on April 2 looked as if it was about to become a disastrous liability. Trump had already imposed, and paused, 25% tariffs on Mexico. Carr feared that if those tariffs were reimposed, he’d have to oversee a kind of emergency evacuation. It would take about 1,000 trucks, and perhaps two years, to transport many tons of embroidering machines to World Emblem’s smaller factories in Georgia and Texas.

More than a dozen members of his sales team were gathered in Fort Lauderdale, all of them trying to ignore the “Liberation Day” news. Seated nearby, Carr muted his computer and did his best to keep a poker face. First, the crawl on CNBC said China would get hit with a market-rattling 34% tariff, on top of the 20% already in place. Then, one by one, other countries were walloped. Eventually, Trump said Mexico and Canada would face a 10% tariff.

Ten percent, Carr thought, we can live with that.

Soon after, he read something else. Companies covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement in 2020, were exempt. World Emblem was one of them.

Not a 10% tariff. No tariff.

It took a moment to put it all together. The prices of competitors in China would soar. His would stay the same. Euphoria set in.

Within days, Carr had reconsidered the notion that he had “dodged a bullet,” as he put it. World Emblem owns a subsidiary in California that sources many of its products from China and Southeast Asia. Come to think of it, some of World Emblem’s raw materials, such as dye, come from China, too. Those prices were going up. And if tariffs helped tip the U.S. economy into recession, the company would suffer.

The sense that he had won much of anything, let alone the lottery, slowly vanished. One afternoon in mid-April, he swiveled a little frenetically in an office chair on the second floor of World Emblem’s factory in Aguascalientes, Mexico. He sized up the changing economic landscape and didn’t like what he saw. The company, he realized, was about to learn a lesson as pointed as any parable. When tariffs hit nearly the entire world, there is no safe harbor.

“This is not just about my customers,” he said. “It’s also about their customers, and their customers’ customers. And consumers. Because demand is about to go down.”

Tiptoeing into Mexico

It’s hard to remember now, but World Emblem’s move to Mexico was exactly what the U.S. government wanted. One objective of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in 1994, was to help Mexico build its middle class, which would ease the flow of migrants north.

A few years before NAFTA took hold, Carr’s father, Jerold, started Emblem Service Center, as it was initially called, near Miami. It was a do-over. The elder Carr’s first emblem company had failed in 1988.

It was a dark period for Randy Carr, then a teenager. His parents had just divorced, and his father, still smarting from the collapse of his business, would fly into rages when Randy asked about it.

The elder Carr was also nearly broke. He called Randy and his older brother, Jamie, and said he could no longer afford their college tuition. Both dropped out and started working for their father.

To economize, all three Carrs shared a one-bedroom apartment. The company didn’t make money for five years as profits were poured back into the business. Jerold kept saying he just wanted to achieve long-term viability before he died. In 2000, Jerold was killed by an aneurysm. Randy, then 26, started running the company, which by then was doing about $4 million a year in sales with 50 employees. Jamie became sales director.

The Mexico idea came from a lawyer he met through a friend. Wages would cost one-third as much as domestic wages, the lawyer said. During a multicity road trip in the country in 2005, Carr was initially unimpressed. At one point, he and the lawyer were briefly pulled over by federal police, who were carrying assault rifles. Nothing happened, but it reinforced the impression that Mexico was dangerous.

The upsides, though, were too enticing, and eventually, he tiptoed in.

Today, World Emblem does just north of $100 million a year.

“I still have paranoia that we’re going to go broke,” he said. “Like, every day.”

‘Irreparable damage’

On Feb. 1, when Trump announced 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, a move out of Mexico suddenly seemed urgent. In Carr’s typical turbocharged style, he wanted to fly to the Dominican Republic the next day. After touring a handful of sites, World Emblem signed a letter of intent on a vacant lot in an industrial park.

He also called a bunch of his biggest customers, all of whom are wholesalers of shirts and hats, most U.S.-based. He told them that he would eat 50% of the tariffs, but pass along the rest to them. Some were understanding, many were livid.

“I’ve got to tell you, there are still some relationships that have yet to recover,” he said in mid-April, after the Mexico tariffs had been lifted. “Irreparable damage.”

Carr is also expanding his factories in Georgia and Texas. Until relief from tariffs was announced April 2, adding square footage to U.S. facilities seemed like the only tariff-free path to growth.

But even if Carr staffs up domestically, the job pays between $15 and $20 an hour, which has not been enough to attract native-born Americans.

Now there’s a new problem. Some of the immigrants Carr employs have been spooked by the Trump administration. Five Venezuelans in the Georgia and Texas plants have quit in recent weeks. Maybe he’ll have to raise wages.

The tariff threat in Mexico has passed, for now. He has other worries. He has long had a hunch that his father’s first company flopped because it didn’t innovate. Starting last year, the company was spending $150,000 a month on artificial intelligence to help streamline orders. In January, that outlay was suspended. So was hiring. He has since restarted both.

His 23-year-old son joined the company. The Trump administration doesn’t grasp how buffeted his and thousands of other companies are by tariffs imposed on everyone else, Carr said. Or how much time it takes for any corporation to change direction.

He describes the trade policy decisions of recent months as a “nightmare.”

What he won’t do is criticize the author of that policy, or discuss whether he supports Trump.

Given how fraught politics have become, caution might be wise. But it’s more than that.

“I’m a capitalist,” he said. “We’re given the rules of the game, and have to play by those rules. Whether I like them or not is not really relevant. We’ve got to survive.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.