Lakeland Fire + Safety, a personal protective equipment (PPE) and fire safety gear manufacturer headquartered in Alabama, has been thinking about tariffs since 2016. The first time President Trump was elected, most of the company’s disposable PPE equipment was manufactured in China. Looking around the corner like all good scenario planners, the company decided to spin up facilities in Vietnam and India.
This time, it’s running that playbook again. In 2024 it acquired Veridian, an Iowa-based fire apparel brand, a strategic move to ramp up fire equipment production as PPE demand subsided in the post-Covid era, Lakeland CFO Roger Shannon told CFO Brew.
The sale accomplished other goals, too. The company could now outfit first responders and firefighters in American-made gear, and had a facility to avoid tariffs.
“When all this tariff discussion started, it was that final layer of comfort,” Shannon said.
Lakeland might be a unicorn in the manufacturing industry. Its ability to seamlessly shift from one region to another is a fairy tale for most companies. But it still offers lessons for CFOs on how to mitigate tariff risk in the future.
Diversity works. Vertical integration is Lakeland’s not-so-secret weapon to deal with tariffs. The company now has manufacturing facilities in eight countries: disposable PPE in China, India, and Vietnam; boots in Romania; helmets in New Zealand; woven materials for fire gear and disposables in Mexico; and more fire gear in Argentina and the US.
Anticipating a renewed batch of tariffs, Lakeland looked into moving some manufacturing out of China. It shifted some of its disposals manufacturing to a Vietnam facility that had been mothballed.
Other companies can’t make that kind of heavy investment into manufacturing when tariff policy changes every few weeks, according to Dawn Tiura, president and CEO of Sourcing Industry Group.
“It’s very expensive to build manufacturing facilities,” Tiura told us. “With an administration that’s only going to be in office for four years, how do you make that long-term bet? Most people are saying, our board doesn’t want to put that money into it…because everything is a wait and see.”
Whiplash. But even with so much advance planning, the new tariffs came as a shock. On so-called “Liberation Day,” when the big whiteboard came out and Trump announced a 46% tariff on Vietnam, Shannon went into serious contingency mode.
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“You start playing out those options,” he said. “Whether it be resuming disposables manufacturing in Mexico, which for us turned out to be the next best option. Scaling up India, that would be probably the second best option, or starting to do disposables manufacturing at Veridian’s facilities in the US, which quite honestly is a distant third.”
Because workers at its Mexico facility were cross-trained in both disposable products and woven textile fire gear, Lakeland could nearshore some of the production to its Mexico plant, where most products are covered under the USMCA and not subject to tariffs.
Slow to move. But not every company can respond so quickly and flexibly. According to Tiura, a big issue with shifting production around like this is the amount of retooling, engineering, and manual labor required to change a production line. Lakeland’s facilities are not machinery heavy, however—mostly just sewing and cutting tables.
“It sounds like the perfect solution,” Tiura said. “[But] the companies that I speak to typically say they don’t have the capital to set up a new plant that quickly, and they don’t have the training and the manpower domestically.”
The Veridian facility attracted Lakeland for this reason as well. Its proximity to Iowa State University, which has a popular textile program, provides a steady pipeline of young, trained workers, according to Shannon.
It seems like Lakeland is a mythical creature made real. It can move production across the globe, invest in a US company, and create US jobs. But for a lot of companies, this latest trade war highlights a stark truth.
“During the pandemic, we found that almost every road led to China,” Tiura said. “We thought we had diversified by having some production in Vietnam and some in China, but the raw materials, or the unfinished product, was all coming out of the same factory in China. So we really weren’t that diversified.”