Resources for Understanding
• U.S. Customs Compliance FAQ
• How to Calculate China Tariffs in 2025
• Congressional Research Service Report on Tariffs
• Handling U.S.-China Tariffs and De Minimis
Trump is reimplementing 100% tarrifs on chinese goods starting November 1st. https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/global-trends/trump-announces-100-tariffs-on-china-over-and-above-any-tariff-they-are-currently-paying/articleshow/124468423.cms
This will directly impact all of your favorite small businesses that manufacture in China.
Hello. This is The Blue Seoul.
I wanted to give you a clear more defined update of what’s going on behind the scenes here at The Blue Seoul.
Firstly, please rest assured that you will be receiving any and all products that you’ve ordered. Just at a lot slower of a rate than we had originally planned.
The Blue Seoul has been facing difficulties in our personal lives for many years now, and all though we have done everything in our power to ensure that our personal lives do not affect our business, it’s become increasingly difficult.
Last year, our packages were mishandled, and incorrectly forwarded from China to the US. Our
forwarding company was audited ontop of this. We have used the same forwarding company for the entire 6 years we’ve been in business, so this was a new hoop for us to jump through. It took a lot of overseas and customs communication to get answers as to where our packages were, and when they’d get to the US. Once our packages arrived to the US, they were held by US custom to be audited. This is when we discovered that the packages were submitted under an incorrect HS code. This means that the goods were not declared correctly.
If you know nothing about imports from China, Chinese manufacturers will often decrease the value of your unit price from let’s say $9 per unit, to .90¢ per unit. Im actually not quite sure why they do it, maybe it’s for our benefit of being imported under the de mininis exemption, but I’m not sure.
This has been the case for the entire 6 years The Blue Seoul has been in business. However, when our packages were audited, we had to submit a lot of documentation, including the invoices for the products from China.
If you don’t know, when you have something shipped from China. You are legally responsible for the declaration, even if you did not have control over the declaration or what was put down. Therefore we were charged for customs and tarrifs on the FULL VALUE, and also penalties even though this was not our fault.
Ontop of that, US customs did not release all the packages, and not all of our packages made it to the US before the tarrif war started by our current administration. When our remaining packages did get into the hands of US customs (In April) they now were under a 100+% tarrif rate.
To this day, we still have not received all of our packages. US customs has been a hassle to work with, charging us insane storage fees for packages we’ve already paid for and inquired about, to the point we had to get legal representation to help us.
The Blue Seoul has always been a business that takes profit, and reinvests it back into The Blue Seoul. All of the new products we’ve manufactured are stuck with customs to this day, because we have decided to completely forfeit the goods as the fees are too much for us to handle. Ontop of this, we also had to pay taxes in May. It has been so much for us to handle, that it genuinely feels/felt like the end of the world.
Since all of our products did not arrive, and much money was lost. We have resorted to making some of the merchandise in house. For example, a small portion of our Daechwita Kitty Blind Boxes were shipped to customers. However, we did not receive all of them. We have resorted to completely hand making them.
Our team learned how to resin print as soon as we began having this issue, and we’ve been printing, sanding, priming, and hand painting thousands of figures. This is very time consuming, ontop of handling our other merchandise as well. I have carpal tunnel in both of my hands, so it makes the process even more difficult.
Tarrifs apply to shipments based on their arrival date, not the original order date.
Shipments that arrived in March were charged 20% tariffs; those arriving in April faced 100–125% tariffs.
We are working multiple other gigs and part time jobs to recover from this. We are working to recover from personal issues, including a divorce that broke up an entire family and had many legal battles within it. We are working through this while living in an abusive and toxic household (if you remember the situation I was in, in 2023, that I shared some information about, it’s only gotten worse.) We are working through this as we are trying not to lose the house we currently live and operate in (while this is not our direct responsibility, it’s still a giant stressor.). Other personal conflicts and situations that are trying to completely tear us down. It’s been a difficult ride trying to play catch up.
Although we have been absent, please understand that this was never our intention to cause worry. We are just running ourselves into the ground. It genuinely feels like we will never catch up, but we have never stopped trying to make everything work out the way it’s supposed to. It became increasingly more difficult to answer mean messages. We were actively getting rape and death threats that were causing mental stress, all we wanted to do was focus on getting these orders out as quickly as possible, and we will continue to do so.
I feel like a shell of a person, I don’t even feel like myself anymore. Every single day is the same thing. Being so completely burnt out that nothing brings us joy anymore, constantly getting sick, health scares, it really seems that the world cannot give us a break.
So I am asking if YOU can please give us a break. We will continue to work tirelessly to get these products out to you. We will recover from this as quickly as possible, and continue shipping out as frequently as we can.
We do wholeheartedly apologize for not meeting the timeframes that we original stated, such as finishing the orders in August and September. We had some major life events that happened in these months that directly impacted this, but also, hand making goods and handling in house production with 1-2 people, when a factory of 30+ would normally be handling it, is not for the weak, and maybe we’re weak, but we’re trying so hard. I will not stop until all of the products are shipped. Even if it genuinely feels like it’s killing me.
We wholeheartedly apologize and would appreciate if you could just give us more time, even if it’s difficult to wait. You will not regret it, we hold a very high standard here at The Blue Seoul in terms of quality, and we hold ourselves to an even higher standard now that we’re making some of them by hand. We are not asking for money, we are not asking for you to pay more than you already have, because it is not your responsibility. You didn’t do this. We didn’t do this, our administration failed us and small business. All we are asking for is more time and understanding.
We made a decision to close the website to avoid an extra bill and put that money towards getting your orders to you faster. We've been trying to connect our domain here, but have been having difficulites. We will update here frequently, and try to form a scheudle that is safe and efficent to get your orders to you.
Thank you.
The Blue Seoul Team.
In the meantime, our current administration is killing businesses like ours, damaging and tearing families apart, and ruining our economy.
Our government is using our resources, our money, to fund a mass genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and tear apart innocent families in the US.
I urge you to take action by registering to vote. Please take part in your local, federal and state elections.
Call, email, text, visit your local authorities and demand change. Our voices deserve to be heard, our current administration is ruining the lives of people they claim to care about.
Peacefully protest. Peacefully advocate.
(The statements above reflect our personal views and political opinions. They are not intended as verified facts or official claims. We encourage you to conduct your own research, verify information independently, and form your own opinion.)
Please view some updated photos below, I will add more to this page as I can. I don't have many as were normally balancing a lot of things at once, but I will continue to take more and upload them here as we continue to progress.
