It's not the same old story. Antique dealers grapple with tariffs.

Phoebe Rohn’s family has been in the antiques business for a while.

Her parents, Fritz and Dana Rohn, got into the industry more than 40 years ago, launching a career that evolved into Montage Antiques about a decade ago. This iteration involved Phoebe, her sister Chloe, her parents, and lots of European antiques. The team sources pieces abroad and ships them back to Millerton, New York, where they prioritize offering wholesale prices to a clientele of design professionals and enthusiasts.

However, the familiar game has changed since April, when what President Donald Trump’s administration called “Liberation Day” kicked in. Antiques, or items more than 100 years old at the time of import, as defined by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, were subject to a 10% or 15% levy, depending on the country of origin.

The policy change came as a shock to the Montage team, Rohn recalled. Historically, antiques have been exempted from tariffs for the simple reason that one cannot domestically produce a century-old Swedish table on the spot.

“Any agenda to impact production has no effect on antiques,” Rohn said. “There are beautiful things being made in the U.S. currently, which is wonderful, and they will be wonderful antiques in about 100 years.”

In the eyes of Kristin Mullen, an interior designer and antique dealer in Dallas, the tariffs are “nothing other than a consumption tax,” she said. “There is no industry we are protecting.”

Trump has said the tariffs are a solution to the trade deficit between the U.S. and its trading partners that he described as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy” of the country. The taxes seek to reinvigorate the manufacturing industry in the U.S. and incentivize consumers to purchase U.S.-made products, among other benefits the administration has named.

Each year, Montage imports anywhere from four to six 40-foot-high cube containers, carefully packed with vintage home goods sourced from countries such as France and Germany. This year, the business has already shipped five containers to the United States, “so we have certainly been feeling the tariffs since they started rolling in.”

Currently, the family business said it is swallowing the cost.

“It’s been really tough,” said Rohn, who currently lives in Germany and handles shipping for the business. “We’re having to run a lot faster to stay in the same place.”

For Montage, that sprint means sourcing many more pieces — an entire extra container’s worth — to keep margins from running dangerously thin.

Those tariffs hit Kristin Mullen, a Dallas-based interior designer and antique dealer, just as she kicked off a sourcing trip in Europe. Faced with the same confusion and opacity that many importers experienced, Mullen “scaled back” her purchases, she said, focusing on finishes and minimizing furniture. Still, the designer operates an online store and, four weeks a year, an in-person shop at the Blue Hills at Round Top home furnishings show in Carmine, Texas, so she had to maintain a product pipeline.

Although those fuzzy details and logistics have “largely stabilized” since April, Mullen said, she’s become vocal about these policies being “the kind of issue that needs to be decided by our Congress, as opposed to the executive [branch]”

Almost all antique dealers in the U.S. can lobby their local representatives, but “very few of us have the ability to lobby our president,” she said. “For myself, I definitely feel I don’t have a voice.”

For now, Mullen said she is also swallowing the tax, in addition to the rising cost of shipping and the stronger Euro, and keeping her pricing in line with previous items. But it’s a “finger to the wind kind of situation,” she said.

“This is going to eventually have an impact on some antique dealers that are not going to be able to sustain those smaller margins,” Mullen explained. Even if some smaller businesses do have to pass costs on, she explained, there’s a ceiling: People are willing to pay only so much for an antique French commode or a Swedish secretary. It’s a wait-and-see approach.

“I do think that in the coming months we will see what ends up happening as far as end prices to consumers, prices to designers, and how many antique sellers are really going to be able to survive in this new environment,” she said.

The only sellers who might have a leg up are bigger dealers who have ample inventory to fall back on as prices rise and taxes cut into profits. If a big dealer was able to bring extra containers of goods into the country earlier this year, when the U.S. dollar was stronger and the tariffs nonexistent, “then they’re feeling pretty good,” Mullen said.

“But you know,” she noted, “eventually that inventory will run out, and then they’ll be in the soup with the rest of us.”

Montage’s newest shipment, which the family is currently unpacking for a weekend wholesale event, was subject to current home furnishing tariff rates. That meant a 10% tax on goods originating in the United Kingdom and 15% on goods originating in the European Union. “This also applies to the cost to ship, so not only the cost of the goods,” Rohn specified.

The new round of tariffs on upholstered furniture — "that's a bit of a different ballpark."

Even so, business is continuing. “Everyone seems to be talking about a recession, but, knock-wood, we’ve been feeling good about the business we’ve been getting,” she said. It’s “been really heartening in these decidedly uncertain times.”

Mullen is also heading back to Europe in two weeks for another sourcing trip. There’s still a demand for antiques, she said, clients crave their soul and character.

But uncertainty remains. “We’re all in fear of an economic downturn,” Rohn said. For now, the family is tightening their belts, working harder, and accelerating turnover to maintain their bottom line.

“But of course, the second economic factors start hitting us, that is just not going to be possible,” she said. “Then we’re really going to be hit on both sides.”