Reporting and analysis from the rooms where commerce policy gets decided.

I spent yesterday at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business with MBA students, hosted by the Center for Business and Public Policy. The topic was what the last two years of trade policy have looked like from inside a small business.

The question I kept getting, in a few different forms, was some version of: so how do you plan?

Here is what I wanted them to walk out with.

Uncertainty is a separate cost from the tariff itself. A rate is a number. You look at it, you run the math, and you decide whether or not you can survive it. That is a decision we can make. The rate changing Thursday to Friday to Monday is not a number we can decide anything about. That is unsustainable uncertainty, and it costs something all on its own.

Adjustment costs come first, and almost nobody sees them. Moving production is not a change of address. It is new safety testing, a new freight forwarder, a new quality control agency, new component suppliers, and months of samples. Cash goes out the door long before a single unit ships, and almost none of it shows up in the data policymakers look at.

Reshoring assumes there is something to come home to. In my category at Sarah Wells Bags, there is not, and there has not been for decades. I looked in 2013, 2017, 2024, and again this year. In March I found a U.S. manufacturer with a DoD CAGE code that makes Berry-compliant bags for the military. I paid to ship them a sample. They could not make my product at any price or quantity, and they offered me their factory in China. One backpack takes fifteen suppliers. Even with U.S. assembly, I am still importing fabric, insulation, hardware, and zippers.

A favorable ruling is not restitution. The Supreme Court ruled IEEPA unlawful and many of us received refunds with interest. That money is not funding hiring or product development. It is sitting in reserve against whatever comes next.

The bright spot is real, and I said so in the room. The small business voice has never been more welcome at the table than it is right now. Reporters want these stories. Committees want this testimony. Doors that used to be closed are open. None of us asked for the last two years, but what is happening to us is going into the record, and someone will read it later.

Thank you to the Center for Business and Public Policy for having me and for the continued partnership.

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

Amazon’s Accelerate conference, with thousands of sellers onsite, is the week of September 21st in Seattle, and I will be there, along with several members of the Modern Commerce board. Our board is small business owners, every one of them, and they will be in sessions and hallways all week. Please say hi!

I am running a workshop called Building with AI While Protecting Brand Integrity, twice. AI is the biggest leveling of the playing field I have seen in small business. But the tools do not know your voice, your customer, or the things you will not compromise on. That part is still ours. Everyone leaves with a listing audit and a set of brand guardrails they wrote themselves.

I am also moderating a panel on the Seller Spotlight Stage, Competing with Giants: How Women Founders Built Category Leaders. Rebecca Quirk of Wallaroo Hats, Spring Faussett of Tiger Tail, and Jodi Berman of Rasta Imposta. Three founders who built category leaders against much bigger competition, and we are going to get into how they actually did it.

So: are you going to be in Seattle? Send me a note and tell me. I want to know who from this list will be there!

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

Bloomberg Law published a piece by Ethan Schenker this week about the small business owners who spent the past year putting a face to the tariff story.

A toy company owner explaining why the spring line got cut. A children’s clothing founder walking through what happened to an order already on the water. An outfitter, a baby products company, a tea importer. Each one describing, in ordinary language, a decision they were making that month because of a policy made in Washington.

That is what moved this. People who were willing to say out loud what a specific experience in their business actually looked like, and to keep saying it after the first interview, when the novelty wore off and the calls kept coming.

It costs something to do that. You are telling your customers your prices are moving. You are telling your competitors more than you would choose to. You are attaching your name and your company to a position some part of your audience may not like.

They did it anyway, and the conversation in Washington changed because of it. Members of Congress who had been discussing tariffs started sharing the experiences of actual companies in their districts. That shift came from owners telling their stories, one at a time, until the story was impossible to miss.

The article mentions that I started a policy nonprofit this year. It is the Center for Modern Commerce Policy, and these owners are part of why I built it. We work on the policy barriers facing small businesses that sell online, and we do it from the perspective of people who are running those businesses right now.

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One of the best moments of my year was honoring Senator Tim Kaine with the National Retail Federation Champion of Main Street award at his Capitol Hill office.

Through two years of tariff upheaval, Senator Kaine has consistently made room for small business owners in a conversation that usually happens without us. He has pushed on the question of whether relief actually reaches the businesses it is meant for. And he has kept asking Virginia business owners what we are seeing rather than making assumptions.

That is what earns the award, and it is why I was glad to be in the room to present it! Thank you, Senator Kaine, and all the policymakers who champion small businesses.

Presenting Senator Tim Kaine with the National Retail Federation Champion of Main Street award at his Capitol Hill office.

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If you lose your job and file for unemployment, you have to certify every week that you are searching for work. That means if you want to spend those weeks building a business instead, you give up the benefit. You have to pick.

There is already a fix on the books in some states. It is called the Self-Employment Assistance program, and it lets eligible people keep receiving their weekly benefit while working full time to launch a business rather than job hunting. The catch is that the program is voluntary for states, barely used, and almost nobody has heard of it. The Labor Department currently lists a handful of states running one.

The NO BOSS Act would modernize that program and give states a ready-made blueprint to stand one up. The House version, H.R. 6431, cleared the Ways and Means Committee 41-0 and passed the House with bipartisan support. I was part of the small business coalition backing it, and our support was entered into the record at the markup.

On July 16, Senators Chris Coons of Delaware, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Jon Husted of Ohio introduced the Senate companion, S. 5010. It now sits with the Senate Finance Committee.

This one is close to home for me. My small business and the Center for Modern Commerce Policy are both based in Virginia, which saw a net decline of about 23,500 civilian federal jobs last year. Northern Virginia absorbed the largest share of it. I live in Fairfax, and I have neighbors on both sides of me working to recover from job loss by starting something of their own. After thirteen years of building Sarah Wells Bags, I know exactly how hard those first months are even when everything goes right. Right now the rules push my neighbors toward the application pile instead of the thing they actually want to build.

Take action

S. 5010 needs cosponsors, and cosponsors come from constituent calls. Reach out to your senators and ask them to cosponsor the NO BOSS Act, S. 5010. It takes about three minutes. Say you are a small business owner in their state, say you support the bill because it helps people start businesses instead of forcing them to choose between a benefit check and a beginning, and if you have your own story about starting with no safety net, say that too. That is the part staff remember.

Then send me a note and tell me you did it. We are tracking which offices are hearing from small business owners, and knowing where the calls are landing makes the next ask sharper.

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

Small businesses are not just experimenting with AI. We are running on it.

At my company we use it to edit product and lifestyle photography, automate financial workflows, improve product listings, support keyword research, and help answer customer questions. We are able to accomplish in a day what we might not have tackled in a year. This is not a novelty for a company our size. It is capacity we could never afford to buy.

Alfred Mai serves as Secretary on the Modern Commerce board and runs ASM Games. In the Connected Commerce Council’s new AI policy playbook, he shared how he is using AI to grow the business. His team uses it for app creation, playtesting, and advertising copy. He also uses it to prepare tight, specific questions before he talks to his lawyer and his CPA. That lets a founder walk into a billable hour prepared instead of paying someone to explain the basics.

That last one is the use case nobody in Washington is picturing. Professional advice is one of the real dividing lines between big companies and small ones. Large firms have counsel on retainer. The rest of us buy it by the hour and ration it. A tool that makes each of those hours count for more is not a convenience. It is access.

Sarah Wells Bags is in the playbook too. My thanks to the team at 3C for including both of our stories.

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

At 12:01 this morning, a new round of Section 301 tariffs took effect on goods from 60 economies, at 10 percent for some countries and 12.5 percent for the rest.

Section 122 expired at the same moment. So for a lot of importers, this reads as a swap rather than a new layer, and I keep seeing it framed as good news.

Here is what makes it different. Section 122 had a 150 day clock written into the statute. This one has no expiration date. USTR also declined to create an exclusion process, saying it would conflict with the President's direction, so there is no petition path either.

I run a mentoring group for small business owners, and I talked this through with them last night, along with a few other groups. The sentiment was consistent, and it was not really about the rate.

It was this. A tariff is paid by the importer of record. That is an American company. The factory abroad does not write that check, and there is most often no domestic factory to shift the work to. So the cost does not move production home. It lands on the American business standing between the factory and the customer, and it stays there.

Read the full scope of the new tariffs, and search for any included exemptions here.

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Last week I had the honor of delivering the morning keynote at Amazon's Seller Growth Summit in New York. Standing on that mainstage and telling the story of building a company from a garage in Virginia into a business serving customers around the world, to a room full of people doing the same hard thing, is something I will not forget.

Then came the rest of the day, and that is what I want to tell you about. The hallway conversations, the questions that kept coming, the founders who wanted to talk through where their business goes next.

Two things came up over and over. The first was growth, which I expected. Sourcing, margins, new channels, what to do about costs that keep moving.

The second is the reason I am writing this. Small business owners want to know how to get involved in advocacy. Not in the abstract, but specifically: who do I talk to, does my story actually matter, how do I start. More people asked me that last week than at any event I have done.

That question is the whole ballgame. Policy gets made about small businesses constantly, and it gets made better when the people living it are in the room. Watching that many owners decide they want to be in the room was the best part of my week.

Delivering the morning keynote at Amazon's Seller Growth Summit in New York, July 16, 2026.

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

This week Modern Commerce submitted a public comment to U.S. Customs and Border Protection on behalf of small importers waiting on IEEPA tariff refunds. You can read our full letter here.

Quick context. After the Supreme Court ruled the IEEPA tariffs unlawful in February, CBP built a system called CAPE to process an estimated $166 billion in refunds. CAPE works well if you are a large importer with a customs broker and an active ACE account. Most small importers have neither. Last week CBP opened a comment period on the paperwork burden and asked whether it should build an alternative path for small filers. That question deserved a documented answer, so we gave it one.

Our comment includes real numbers from a small Virginia importer (surprise, it’s Sarah Wells Bags) that went through the full recovery process: roughly 40 hours of internal time over ten months, more than 25 email exchanges with CBP, and $900 in attorney and CPA fees. All in, recovering the refund cost about $2,900. The refund was $15,741. That means nearly a fifth of the money the government was ordered to return went to the cost of getting it back. CBP paid $624.85 in interest, which covered about a fifth of the recovery cost.

We asked CBP to build a small-business path around four principles: no new expenses to get a refund, let CBP assemble the entry data it already holds, a simple direct route for filers without ACE accounts, and proactive notice to businesses that are owed money and may not know it.

Here is the part that matters for you. If your business paid IEEPA duties, you can and should consider filing your own comment if simplification for small businesses matters to you. This is one of the moments when a federal agency is directly asking small businesses how a process should work, and individual comments from real importers carry real weight. A few paragraphs on what the refund process has cost you, or why you have not started, is exactly the evidence CBP needs to see. Comments are due September 8, 2026 by email to CBP_PRA@cbp.dhs.gov with OMB Control Number 1651-0149 in the subject line. Full instructions are in the Federal Register notice.

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

This week the National Retail Federation brought its America’s Retail Champions to Washington for the Retail Advocates Summit. Fifty small business owners from 27 states were honored this year, 25 came to DC, five advanced as finalists, and one was named the 2026 America’s Retail Champion at the July 15 summit. Congratulations to all the small businesses honored!

Here is what stayed with us from the room: A small business owner who takes the time to thank a member of Congress for a vote, a letter, or a meeting stands out, and that gratitude is what turns a one-time meeting into a working relationship. Advocacy is not a transaction. It is a partnership built over years, and partnerships are built on both the ask and the acknowledgment.

If a policymaker has done something that helped your business this year, tell them. Those few minutes can keep the door open for the conversation that matters next.

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

On July 16, I'm at Amazon's Seller Growth Summit in New York delivering the morning keynote, sharing the road from a garage in Virginia to customers around the world. I'm proud of the talk. But if I'm honest, the part I'm most looking forward to is everything around it: the hallway conversations, the questions after sessions, the seller at the coffee station who tells me the key thing that would help their business grow that makes for an “ah-ha” moment. Modern Commerce exists to carry what sellers are facing into the rooms where policy gets made, and that only works if we never stop asking. I love these conversations!

The day before, on July 15, I'll be in Washington for the National Retail Federation's Retail Advocates Summit, where dozens of small business owners will spend the day talking with policymakers about the issues shaping their businesses, tariffs among them. I'm attending as a small business owner myself, honored to be named one of NRF's 2026 America's Retail Champions. That evening, NRF names the overall 2026 America's Retail Champion from five finalists, all of them small business owners who have shown what it looks like to speak up for this community. One of the five is Alfred Mai, founder of ASM Games, who also serves on the Modern Commerce board. I'll be cheering for Alfred and for every one of my colleagues.

All told, it's a week of listening to small businesses and hearing what they want Washington to understand. If you run a small business, send me a note and tell me the one issue keeping you up at night right now. Tariffs, taxes, classification, lending, complexity, shipping costs, something nobody's talking about yet. I'd like your voice in my notebook before the week starts.

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I spend a lot of time in seller and small business groups, including the mentoring and peer-sharing group of woman-owned businesses we started from Sarah Wells Bags in 2024, and lately a new issue keeps coming up. A state law took effect recently that says if you use an AI-generated person in an advertisement, you have to disclose it. Small businesses are reading it in good faith, trying to comply, and finding they cannot answer basic questions about what they are actually supposed to do.

Here is the law, plainly. New York passed the first-in-the-nation Synthetic Performer Disclosure Law, effective June 9, 2026. If an ad contains an AI-generated person who looks real but is not a real identifiable individual, the advertiser has to conspicuously disclose it. It applies to any business whose ad could reach a New York consumer, wherever the business sits. Penalties are $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 after that, enforced by the state. It is narrower than the panic suggests. It only covers AI-generated humans. A product shot with no person in it is not in scope.

Then you try to apply it, and the questions start.

What counts as an advertisement? A paid ad, clearly. Your own product listing or a photo on your homepage, unclear. One law firm says e-commerce listings are swept in. Nobody can tell you with certainty at this stage.

How are you supposed to know your image reaches a New Yorker? If you sell nationally online, you cannot wall New York off, so the geographic limit is not really a limit for a small seller.

And what does “conspicuous” mean? The law requires it and then does not define it. No size, no placement, no wording.

The law does settle one thing: the duty sits with the business that produces the ad. For most people in these groups, that business is one person doing their own marketing at the kitchen table.

None of this is an argument against the goal. Consumers have a fair interest in knowing when a person on screen was invented. The problem is that the clarity a small business needs in order to comply was not built before the law went live, so the smallest businesses are the ones absorbing the uncertainty while the definitions get sorted out later. The penalties land unevenly too. The same $1,000 or $5,000 fine a large company barely notices can set a small business back hard.

And this is the first one. New York is being called a template, with California likely to follow next. A digital or omni-channel seller is looking at a growing patchwork of these laws, each with its own definitions and its own idea of what counts.

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The National Retail Federation has named its 2026 class of America’s Retail Champions, and two people close to the Center for Modern Commerce Policy are among those recognized. Alfred Mai, a Modern Commerce board member and founder of ASM Games in San Francisco, advanced as one of five national finalists. Sarah Wells, founder and Executive Director of Modern Commerce and founder of Sarah Wells Bags in Fairfax, Virginia, was named among the fifty honorees.

America’s Retail Champions recognizes small business retailers who stand out as advocates for the retail industry and the communities they serve. Honorees are nominated by state retail associations and industry peers based on their work in public policy at the local, state, and national level. Fifty small retailers were selected this year, with five advancing as finalists. One will be named the 2026 America’s Retail Champion on July 15 at a dinner during NRF’s Retail Advocates Summit in Washington, D.C.

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

My last IEEPA refund hit my bank account this morning. I exhaled when I saw it. On the Sarah Wells Bags side of my work, the refund chapter of this story is finally closed.

For me. That is the part I cannot get past.

Because the same morning my money landed, thousands of other small importers are nowhere close. Some are stuck in the complexity. Some are locked out of the government’s import portal entirely, because their customs broker always handled it and they have never once logged in. Some do not know how to get their claim submitted. And plenty are still sitting on the hardest question of all: where do I even start?

For the businesses further back in line, the path to their own money may run through federal court. Let me be plain about what that means for a small business. Litigation is not a real option for most of us. It is outside the budget and outside the bandwidth, when you are already running a company with no slack to spare. Telling a founder to sue to recover money she already paid is not a path. It is a wall.

This is the asymmetry I keep coming back to. The smallest businesses got hit the hardest, and they have the least help getting their own money back.

And here is what I am sitting with, even with the money in my account this morning. Is it mine to spend? I would love to pour it back into the holes this left in my business. But Section 122 expires next month, new tariffs are already taking shape behind it, and the legal fights are not over. So the refund I just got may not be money to rebuild with. It may be money I have to hold for what is coming.

A refund you cannot safely spend is not relief. It is a reprieve. We are not out of this yet.

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The DC Council's FY2027 budget includes a 20-cent surcharge on every carrier-for-hire delivery that ends in the District. Despite the “Food Access Support” name, it is not limited to food. It applies to all deliveries, including the everyday orders your customers place.

The fee is flat, so it lands hardest on small orders and small sellers. It is destination-based, so it applies whenever your customer is in DC, no matter where you ship from. There is no small business exemption, no cap on future increases, and no clear answer on who collects and remits it.

The surcharge passed first reading as part of the FY2027 budget and faces a second and final vote in the weeks ahead. This week, Modern Commerce wrote to all 13 members of the DC Council, laid out these compliance problems in detail, and urged them to reject it as written before that vote.

Send a message

If you sell to customers in DC, you can add your voice in about two minutes. Email the Council Chairman and the member who represents your customers' ward. You are welcome to use the message below.

Who to contact

Click a name to open a ready-to-send email, or call. Contact details current as of June 2026; you can confirm any of them at dccouncil.gov.

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A Georgetown trade scholar just published the clearest legal breakdown yet of where the new Section 301 tariffs are headed. It went up this weekend in Reason, written by Peter Harrell, the trade attorney who helped build the arguments that took down the IEEPA tariffs. Reading it, I kept thinking: this is exactly what we testified about a few weeks ago.

Here is the short version. In February, the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs. Within hours, the administration began rebuilding them through other authorities, first Section 122, now Section 301, with fresh investigations into dozens of trading partners, Cambodia among them, where I moved my own production. The goal is not hidden: Treasury's own Secretary says he expects rates back to their old levels within months. The legal vehicle keeps changing. The bill to small businesses stays the same.

I sat in that hearing room and testified on the excess capacity case against Cambodia. Cambodia's garment, footwear, and travel goods exports grew 16% in the first nine months of last year. That is not a shadowy overcapacity scheme. That is American small businesses like mine doing exactly what U.S. policy told us to do: get out of China. We were told to diversify. We did. Now the diversification is being called the problem.

And it is not over. Scholars are flagging real legal vulnerabilities in how these tariffs were built, the Section 122 tariffs expire this summer and are already in appeals, and another round of determinations is coming for the same small businesses that have absorbed three years of this.

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If you run your own website, there is a litigation pattern worth understanding, because it has been hitting small sellers hard and most never see it coming. A small number of plaintiffs file suits claiming a business's website is not accessible to people with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The accessibility goal is real. The problem is the model that has grown up around it: a demand letter, often with a settlement number attached, and many owners pay to make it go away before they understand what happened.

By the bill sponsor's count, these website lawsuits grew from fewer than 200 in 2016 to more than 4,000 in 2025. A bill, H.R. 7328, has been in the House Energy and Commerce Committee since February. It would give a business 180 days to bring its site into compliance after formal notice before a suit can be filed, and it keeps the accessibility requirement in place. It just adds a chance to fix the problem first.

We are tracking this closely and working alongside other small-business advocates on it. If you have received one of these demand letters, we would like to hear about it. Get in touch.

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

Over the past week, Modern Commerce sent letters to all 13 members of the DC Council about a piece of the FY2027 budget that has flown mostly under the radar: a flat 20-cent surcharge on carrier-for-hire trips that end in the District. In plain terms, that reaches the app-based parcel and same-day deliveries small businesses and their customers count on every day.

Here is why it matters, even if you are nowhere near DC:

• The fee is charged based on where a delivery ends, not where the business sits. A seller in Virginia or Maryland would still see their DC customers pay more on every order.
• It is a flat charge, so it falls hardest on the smallest orders and the smallest sellers, the ones least able to absorb it.
• It reaches the everyday deliveries people genuinely rely on, including seniors, caregivers, and parents juggling work and a newborn.

We know small businesses do not have extra cash and are tapped out on raising prices. Stopping new fees at the policy root is exactly where advocacy earns its keep. A final vote is still ahead, and Modern Commerce will stay engaged.

Published in The Modern Commerce Brief. Subscribe to get it weekly →

This week, Modern Commerce Executive Director Sarah Wells joined CNN to put the small-business side of the tariff story in front of a national audience. The conversation focused on what the IEEPA refund process actually means for small importers: who qualifies, how the queue works, and why getting this capital back matters for companies that have been fronting tariff costs for months.

Most small importers still do not know how the refund process works, and the owners most affected are often the least likely to have a customs broker walking them through it. Bringing that perspective to a national broadcast is part of the job. The refunds are real money, and owners deserve to understand how to claim what they are owed.

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I sat in a stakeholder meeting at Customs and Border Protection on how the IEEPA tariff refunds are actually being processed. I was there as a small business owner and importer, not in any official capacity, and what I heard is useful enough that I want to pass it on. (I was able to be in the room thanks to an invitation through the National Retail Federation.)

The short version: refunds are moving, and the order they move in is not what most people assume.

• Refund size does not move you up the line. Bigger refunds are not getting priority.
• It is first come, first served by application date. When you filed your CAPE application matters most.
• Within that, your entry status sets priority. Entries that are liquidated, in the grace period, or close to liquidating are processed first.
• Phase 1 is for clean entries only. Anything tangled up in errors or other complications waits for a later phase.
• The outer window is 60 to 90 days from your application date. If your CAPE shows accepted status and you pass 90 days with no refund, that is your cue to contact CBP.
• Applying now means you are behind everyone who filed earlier, with entry status layered on top.

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A bill worth knowing passed the House 41-0 on April 27, 2026, and it is now in the Senate: the NO BOSS Act (H.R. 6431, the New Opportunities for Business Ownership and Self-Sufficiency Act).

Here is the idea in plain English. Today, if you lose your job and start a business, you generally give up your unemployment benefits the moment you start working for yourself. The NO BOSS Act would let people keep receiving those benefits while they get a new business off the ground, instead of forcing a choice between a paycheck and a fresh start. CBO scored it as essentially budget-neutral, and it cleared the House with unanimous, bipartisan support.

It is exactly the kind of practical fix that helps people become small business owners in the first place. We will keep readers posted as it moves through the Senate.

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