Lifestyle
How Pandora Is Surviving Trump’s Trade War
Pandora, the world’s largest jewelry company, is based in Denmark and has nearly 500 stores in the United States, more than in any of its other key markets. But in some ways, its real home is Thailand, where the company has been making its products for nearly four decades.
Like many global corporations, Pandora has used a continent-crossing supply chain to sell its goods worldwide at a low cost. But last month, that supply chain became a grave weakness when President Trump said he would impose 36 percent tariffs on goods entering the United States from Thailand, alongside steep tariffs on dozens of other countries.
After Mr. Trump unveiled his “reciprocal” tariffs, Pandora’s shares were among the worst performing in Europe. A week later, Mr. Trump postponed those tariffs until early July, offering a reprieve.
But the threat looms, and Alexander Lacik, the chief executive of Pandora, is not expecting the uncertainty that is paralyzing businesses to end. Unless tariffs return to previous levels, the next year will be turbulent, he said in an interview. For now, he added, there is little to do but wait to see how investors, customers and competitors react.
“With the information at hand today, I would be crazy to make big strategic decisions,” Mr. Lacik said.
Alongside business leaders all over the world, Mr. Lacik is grappling with how to respond to Mr. Trump’s unpredictable policies, which have generated almost maddening uncertainty. The Trump administration has started to show a willingness to lower tariffs, but his first agreements, with Britain and China, have posed more questions than answers, and tariffs are still higher than they were a couple of months ago.
Although some aspects of the trade war have been suspended, Pandora and other multinationals are in limbo, waiting for more agreements to be completed.
Pandora, best known for its silver charm bracelets, has been making jewelry in Thailand since 1989. Across three factories, thousands of people handcraft the products. The company is building a fourth plant in Vietnam, but Mr. Trump has threatened tariffs of 46 percent on Vietnamese goods.
Last year, the company sold 113 million pieces of jewelry, about three items every second, making it the largest jewelry brand by volume, with stores in more than 100 countries. A third of its sales, 9.7 billion Danish kroner, or $1.4 billion, were generated in the United States, and Mr. Lacik said he had no intention of moving away from the company’s most profitable market.
But prices will rise, he said, and who will bear the brunt of that is unclear.
“The big question is, am I going to pass on everything to the U.S. consumer, or am I going to peanut butter it out and raise the whole Pandora pricing globally?” Mr. Lacik said.
But Pandora keeps several months’ worth of stock, giving him time to see how other jewelers change their pricing and then decide.
A few things can be done immediately, such as streamlining parts of the supply chain. The day after the reciprocal tariffs were announced, Pandora said it would change its distribution so that products sold in Canada and Latin America would no longer move through the company’s distribution hub in Baltimore, a process that would take six to nine months to complete.
Moving production into the United States is not being considered, in part because of higher labor costs. Pandora employs nearly 15,000 craftspeople in Thailand and expects to hire 7,000 more in Vietnam.
In an earnings report last week, the company estimated the cost of the trade war. If higher tariffs on Thai imports, 36 percent, and Chinese imports, 145 percent, go back into effect, they will cost Pandora 500 million Danish kroner, or $74 million, this year, and then 900 million Danish kroner, $135 million, annually after that.
But the jeweler is not panicking. In fact, the economic curveballs are starting to feel normal, Mr. Lacik said. “We are battle ready,” he added.
When he joined the company as the chief executive in 2019, Pandora was struggling. Its share price had dropped more than 70 percent from its peak three years earlier. Mr. Lacik instituted a “complete overhaul,” he said, with new branding and store designs, an emphasis on its “affordable luxury” label, and a showcase of its complete jewelry line, not just charms.
That prepared the company for the trials that hit the global economy next. First, the Covid-19 pandemic, when 15,000 store employees were sent home and some factory workers slept on cots to keep production going. Then a surge in inflation risked customers pulling back.
Mr. Lacik’s strategy appeared to be working. In January, Pandora’s share price reached a record high. Since then, however, it has dropped more than 20 percent.
The company has managed to shield itself from some of the trade turmoil. After Mr. Trump raised tariffs on China during his first term, Pandora stopped sourcing all of its showroom furniture and display materials for its 3,000 stores from China.
“We had some readiness,” Mr. Lacik said, so they were not “caught completely with our pants down.”
Aria Hannah sat in a second-floor studio at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, surrounded by garments that had seen better days. There were jeans with crotch holes and a T-shirt that was disintegrating at the collar. A pair of polka-dot socks were practically begging to be darned.
“A moth hole is such a beautiful thing to have,” said Hannah, 20, a junior studying fashion design. “It’s just an opportunity for something new.”
She and the dozen or so other students in the room make up Pratt’s Mending Circle, a group of young people that convenes twice a month to sip bergamot tea and reinforce pocket linings. For a little over a year, its members have brought well-worn clothes from their closets — and sometimes their classmates’, too — and stitched them back into circulation.
Hannah used a needle and thread to close up a hole in the navy blue wool coat she had been wearing all winter. She was next to Gianna Breinig, 21, the club’s president, who pinned a patch of cobalt fabric to a threadbare section of a friend’s pants. (In return, he had promised her a free tattoo.)
“I love being able to help people repair things that otherwise maybe they’d just throw out,” said Breinig, a junior from Gilbert, Ariz. “Like, let me show you how to fix that.”
Sewing circles have existed for generations, including groups organized through local churches in the 19th century, Abolitionist sewing circles and those that sprang up in response to textile-rationing efforts in World War II. But mending skills have experienced a modest resurgence in recent years, and sewing and other hands-on hobbies are taking off among some members of Gen Z.
The mending circle at Pratt draws mostly fashion design students who treat each distressed T-shirt as a creative prompt: How might a frayed hem be transformed with eye-catching embroidery?
The club grew out of a series of meet-ups organized by Brooke Garner, 36, an assistant professor of fashion design at Pratt. She hoped to offer an environment in which students could decompress while working on clothing that had nothing to do with their schoolwork.
“I see it so clearly as an act of resistance against all these negative forces that we’re up against, whether it’s consumerist fast fashion or just this pressure to always be producing and making something new,” Garner said.
She gathered skeins of yarn, spools of thread, embroidery hoops and old T-shirts to use as fabric scraps. (Many supplies came from a neighborhood “Buy Nothing” group on Facebook.) Only two or three students showed up at first, but eventually, word of the mending circle spread. “Everybody has a pile of clothes that need to be repaired, right?” Garner said.
During a mending session in late April, Garner put on a playlist of gentle piano music. Students filed in, chatting about the projects they needed to get done before the end of the semester.
Jacob Jenkins, 20, said he saw clothing repair as a practical necessity for his generation. “I think we’re at a time where we can’t buy new clothes — we don’t have the money,” he said. He had big plans to embroider the canvas of a pair of worn-out Converse.
Theo Goldman, 21, cut a laundry bag into patches that he was stitching to a pair of jeans. He is a fan of sashiko, a Japanese form of needlework that is both decorative and fortifying. With the technique, a piece of clothing “can be even stronger than it used to be,” he said.
When students wanted a break, they added embellishment to a fabric quilt that belongs to the whole group. Auguste DuBois, 22, wove a blue-and-green cord with a two-pronged tool called a lucet. Camila Terreros, 21, repaired a hole in the pocket of her bomber jacket.
Elena Scherer, 20, knitted the sleeve of a cardigan from a lightweight Icelandic wool. What did she think was drawing people her age to mending?
“Honestly, there could be a deeper answer about climate change or whatever, but I think people think that it looks cool,” Scherer said. Visible mending techniques create clothes that are not just newly wearable, she added, they are one of a kind.
Most of the group’s regulars said their mending skills had come a long way since they started showing up. Their work did not always come out looking perfect, but perfection was not the point, said Alma Rosado, 22, who wore a pair of her father’s pants that she had repaired herself.
“I’ve learned more techniques,” she said, “but also more patience.”
After more than two decades working as a journalist, I’ve heard a lot of ways that people reuse their newspapers: lining a pet’s cage or litter box; cleaning a grill; shoving several pages into sneakers to help them dry after they get soaked during a hike with creek crossings.
I am a big advocate of repurposing items to keep them out of the landfill, and yet, I have never felt like any of these reuses celebrates the print medium for what it can provide beyond information.
That’s one reason I wanted The Times to publish a kite design in the Weekend section in coordination with the staff at Clockshop, a local community arts nonprofit, just in time for its annual kite festival, which is from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Los Angeles State Historic Park, 1245 N. Spring St.
And now here’s your chance to make one.
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In Sunday’s newspaper, you’ll find a colorful trapezoid kite along with printed instructions on how to build the kite as well as a QR code that links to a video of our team showing you how to build it. Regardless of whether you attend the kite festival, this edition of the Weekend section deserves to fly far beyond the confines of your recycling bin.
You can buy a copy of the Sunday newspaper at local newsstands and most 7-Eleven, Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons, Circle K and CVS locations.
If you aren’t able to snag a print newspaper, we’ve also included a digital download where you can print a version of our kite design. The instructions are also below.
Skip to instructions for:
Kite using newspaper | Kite using digital version
The look of our kite was designed by L.A. artist Ben Sanders, who said he drew inspiration from our local landscape.
“I kind of wanted it to look like gusts of wind,” said Sanders, who hadn’t previously illustrated a kite design, “and I was thinking about wind gusts on the beach and pink sunsets and the shoreline and … maybe a sun that’s being refracted.”
I have so many memories of flying kites, but I must admit: Several of them aren’t great. What’s more disappointing as a little kid than running outside with a kite in your arms, anticipating your moment of glory, only to watch it crash repeatedly?
I asked Yaeun Stevie Choi, an L.A.-based artist and kite maker, what some common reasons kites fail were.
“This is where the physics part of kites comes in,” they said. “Generally speaking, there are essential ingredients of how a kite flies, so if you don’t have those, perhaps it will fail.”
For example, kites need to be designed symmetrically to successfully catch the wind, which is often blowing horizontally, Choi said, adding that sometimes people don’t attach a kite’s tail properly, not realizing the tail helps the kite orient itself. Or the kite maker might have attached the string in a way that inhibits the kite’s ability to catch air pressure and rise.
The kite that readers can build using The Times’ Weekend section.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
And sometimes the ratio is just off. The area of the sail (in our case, the trapezoid shape in our newspaper) to the weight of the spars (the frame or rigid sticks that allow the kite to hold its shape) really matters. Heavier spars require a larger sail while people who build miniature kites sometimes don’t include a spar or will only use half a toothpick, Choi said.
Choi estimated that around six of their first kites failed. I asked them how someone can get over the embarrassment they might feel when their kite just doesn’t fly.
Choi produced a mischievous grin. “You wear a mask, like a monster mask [or] your favorite animal,” they said. “So you wear a penguin mask, so [onlookers] are like, ‘Oh, the penguin made a failing kite.’ They won’t be like, ‘Oh, a person embarrassed themselves.’”
In all seriousness, building and flying a kite is an opportunity to embrace a challenge rather than view a difficult task in binary terms, a point Choi and I discussed.
I also asked Sue Bell Yank, Clockshop’s executive director, how the kite festival began.
The organization wanted to celebrate the open sky above L.A. State Historic Park and reclaim what could be taken if the controversial electric aerial gondola system, first proposed in 2018 by a company funded by former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, were built, as it would take passengers over the park on its way to Dodger Stadium.
Over the years, the festival has evolved into a celebration of the artistry of kite-making, although Clockshop still views it as a “joyful protest” that brings communities together on public lands, Yank said.
“There’s a sense of freedom in connecting yourself to the ground and the air and with the wind,” Yank said. “You’re working in concert with nature to get this kite off the ground.”
That’s the spirit that my colleagues and I had when we started this process.
The staff at Clockshop gave us a few kite designs they suggested we consider. Then Faith Stafford, a senior deputy design director, worked diligently to re-create one design out of newspaper. And because we’re journalists, we tested it since printing thousands of copies of a design that doesn’t work would require a historic and embarrassing correction none of us would fully recover from.
I procured kitchen twine from The Times’ Kitchen manager Luciana Momesso, and three of us — Stafford, deputy features editor Marques Harper and I — headed to The Times’ parking garage at our El Segundo office.
At the top of the garage, we asked one another: “Do you know how to fly a kite?” It was immediately clear we’d focused intensely on every detail of our kite-making process but that.
We wandered around the parking lot until we found the breeziest spot, although I was also Googling “How to fly a kite successfully.” Stafford bravely let our first newspaper prototype go, and there was a collective sigh of relief and joyous exclamation when our kite flew.
At the annual kite festival, The Times will have a booth where you can talk with us about our kite and snag a copy of the Weekend section that includes the kite design (while supplies last).
I am so eager to see our newspaper used in a tactical, whimsical way — a reuse option that’s been there all along.
How to build the L.A. Times kite (newspaper version)
Materials needed
- One May 3 edition of the L.A. Times’ Weekend section
- Two 17¼-inch bamboo spars, commonly found at grocery or gardening stores* (see notes)
- Kite line made of kitchen twine** and a winder***
- Scissors
- Transparent tape
1. Using your cellphone, take photos of the newspaper kite design on the L1 cover and on pages L6-7 and L10 before you start cutting so you have a reference point.
2. Now you’re ready to build our kite. First, leaving them in one large piece, cut out the trapezoid-shaped kite sail and the two thin triangles on these pages.
3. Cut out the trapezoidal vent in the middle of the sail, as indicated, and discard.
4. If you correctly followed Step 2 and left the kite sail and two triangles together in one large piece, skip to Step 6. If you mistakenly cut the triangles from the sail, follow this step: Tape the two triangular sections to the bottom of the sail, taping the base of the triangles (non-pointy ends) to the sail on both sides. You want the straight side of each triangle to face outward while both triangles’ angled sides face inward toward each other. (See images from your phone for reference.)
5. Now you’re ready to cut out and connect the strips to make the kite tail:
- Using the arrows as your guide, cut the portion below into six long strips. Make note of the letters on each end.
- Applying tape to both sides, tape A to A, B to B, C to C, etc., then tape all the strips until you have one long strip that starts and ends on yellow like the line below. The colors will match at each seam as the diagram below shows.
6. On the undecorated back side of the sail, tape the spars in place, as shown below.
7. Get the tail pieces you cut and assembled during Step 5. You will tape each end of the tail to where it matches the width of the triangular sections to make a connected long loop.
8. Turn the kite over so the front (decorated) side faces up. Tie your kite line securely around the spars, where they cross in the middle of the vent. Use two overhand (shoelace-style) knots.
9. If using a homemade winder,*** consider gluing or taping the string to the winder so that your string stays connected if you happen to use all of your string to fly the kite.
Notes:
* We tested our kite with bamboo spars, but if you don’t have those around your home, you could also try taping wooden coffee stirrers or other thin, lightweight wooden objects — although bamboo chopsticks might be too heavy. Some kitemakers have success with straws, but straws typically work better with diamond-shaped kites. A final option would be old wire hangers, but that could require a longer tail.
** We used kitchen twine, but other options are crochet thread as long as it isn’t too thick, or fishing line, although it can be difficult to see and tangles easily. You can also find string options at your local craft store. You want to have between 50 to 100 feet of string for the kite.
*** We tested our kite without a winder, but you can make one out of many household objects, including an empty toilet paper roll, a small, sturdy piece of cardboard or anything else around your home that will help you keep from tangling your line.
How to build the L.A. Times kite (digital version)
Materials needed
- One L.A. Times kite pattern printed on two 11-by-17-inch sheets of 20- to 24-pound paper* see notes
- Two 17¼-inch bamboo spars, commonly found at grocery or gardening stores** (see notes)
- Kite line made of kitchen twine** and a winder***
- Scissors
- Transparent tape
1. Print the pattern, ensuring the design is set to print on 11-by-17-inch (tabloid) size paper at 100% to scale. The design might not print correctly if your printer settings are set to “fit to page,” “fit to paper” or “fit to printable area.”
2. Cut out the trapezoid shape (your kite’s sail) on page 1 and the two triangular segments on the right and left side of the trapezoid shape.
3. Tape the two triangular sections to the bottom of the sail, taping the base of the triangles (non-pointy ends) to the sail on both sides. You want the straight side of each triangle to face outward while both triangles’ angled sides face inward toward each other (see below).
4. Cut the white space out of the middle of the trapezoid. This will be your kite’s vent. You don’t need this small white piece for your kite.
5. Now you’re ready to cut out and connect the strips (page 2) to make the kite tail:
- Using the arrows as your guide, cut the portion below into six long strips. Make note of the letters on each end.
- Applying tape to both sides, tape A to A, B to B, C to C, etc., then tape all the strips until you have one long strip that starts and ends on yellow like the line below. The colors will match at each seam as the diagram below shows.
6. On the undecorated back side of the sail, tape the spars in place, as shown below.
7. Get the tail pieces you cut and assembled during Step 5. You will tape each end of the tail to where it matches the width of the triangular sections to make a connected long loop.
8. Turn the kite over so the front (decorated) side faces up. Tie your kite line securely around the spars, where they cross in the middle of the vent. Use two overhand (shoelace-style) knots.
9. If using a homemade winder,*** consider gluing or taping the string to the winder so that your string stays connected if you happen to use all of your string to fly the kite.
10. Go have fun!
Notes:
* We recommend printing your design on an 11-by-17-inch, 20- or 24-pound piece of durable paper, like bond paper.
** We tested our kite with bamboo spars, but if you don’t have those around your home, you could also try taping wooden coffee stirrers or other thin, lightweight wooden objects — although bamboo chopsticks might be too heavy. Some kitemakers have success with straws, but straws typically work better with diamond-shaped kites.
*** We used kitchen twine, but other options are crochet thread as long as it isn’t too thick, or fishing line, although it can be difficult to see and tangles easily. You can also find string options at your local craft store. You want to have around 50 feet of string for the kite.
**** We tested our kite without a winder, but you can make one out of many household objects, including an empty toilet paper roll, a small, sturdy piece of cardboard or anything else around your home that will help you keep from tangling your line.
Sources: The Drachen Foundation; Trépanier Trapezoid kite design by Québec-based artist Robert Trépanier
Hats? The Kentucky Derby had a few.
In the hours leading up to America’s most famous horse race, spectators in Louisville engaged in the event’s other time-honored tradition (apart from day drinking): parading around Churchill Downs in attention-grabbing outfits.
But it wasn’t just hats — fascinators, fedoras, bowlers, boaters, flowers and feathers (so many feathers) — that caught the eye. There were equine-inflected accessories too: purses, patterns, jackets, brooches and at least one vest.
A wild ride, as always.
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