Why American Manufacturing Is So ‘Disincentivized,’ According to a Hardware CEO

The Impulse Cooktop is, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has accurately described it, a “status stove.” Made out of “sleek black glass” with “burners that resemble a DJ turntable,” the kitchen appliance also has a large battery that allows it to double as an energy storage device.

The company that makes this stove, Impulse Labs, is thus exposed to two very volatile policy areas: subsidies for clean energy (its stoves, which will start shipping this summer, are currently eligible for a 30% tax credit that knocks down the prices from $5,999 to $4,200) and the global electronics supply chain.

I spoke with Impulse founder and chief executive Sam D’Amico on Wednesday, before President Trump announced his modified tariff policy eliminating so-called “reciprocal” duties and hiking the rate on Chinese goods to 145%. I wanted to get a sense of how the electrical and appliance supply chain — a key aspect of home decarbonization, and one that’s intensely globalized — was being affected by Trump’s on-and-off tariff announcements.

“Our attitude is, ‘Don’t panic and wait,’” he told me. “I don’t think we’re in a position to actually make changes right now, because it appears that things may settle out,” he said he’d been telling his staff — an attitude that was proved wise mere hours later when Trump largely reversed course.

I reached back out to D’Amico on Thursday after Trump’s tariff reversal to see what, if anything, had changed for him. “Currently we tariff tons of manufacturing inputs (since many come from China), which makes it very challenging to onshore production vs. move final assembly to a non-China country,” he told me by email. “The changing policies make it tricky to plan ahead as hardware has significant latency from design to mass production,” he added, quoting top Trump advisor Elon Musk: “The factory is the product.”

Impulse does have U.S.-made components, namely semiconductors (although those chips get packaged in Malaysia). But certain parts of the electronics and energy storage supply chain are always going to be in China, practically speaking. Impulse stoves feature lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, and “all LFP batteries are built in China,” D’Amico explained.

Pointing to none other than YouTube star-turned-consumer packaged good entrepreneur MrBeast, who has been vocal about the tariffs making it comparatively less expensive for him to produce his chocolate bars outside the country, D’Amico walked me through what it would be like to try to build a battery pack in the United States. You would likely have to import the cells from China, which controls almost all of the LFP cathode active material market. With the new tariffs, what was a $100 per kilowatt-hour U.S.-made battery becomes an over $200 per kilowatt-hour U.S.-made battery. “Assembly in the United States is presently disincentivized,” D’Amico said.

Even manufacturing relatively simple components in the U.S. can be expensive. The Impulse stove is 30 inches, whereas many ranges are 36 inches, and the company has received numerous requests to offer an adapter. At first D’Amico and his team thought, “This is a simple thing to build in the United States,” he told me. “It’s a painted sheet metal part.” U.S. sheet metal pourers quoted him $750. The Chinese quote? Below $200. Even with a 145% tariff, manufacturing in China would still be cheaper.

“Now imagine that all of these vendors are going to be super slammed because of the tariffs and stuff like that — and also the tariffs on steel and aluminum,” D’Amico added. For these reasons and more, he told me, he’s extremely skeptical of any plan to encourage American manufacturing by way of tariffs.

D’Amico told me that American contract manufacturers, such as they exist, either “suck,” “build exquisite medical device stuff,” or are too big to deal with startups. Figuring out contract manufacturing is so important, he said, that hardware entrepreneurs should map out the supply chain for their product first, then design their business around it.

“A really big failure point of hardware startups is they’ll go and build stuff out of — maybe not hobbyist components — but they’ll build an exquisite first prototype, and then they’ll have to realize they have a painful conversion process to figure out how to scale this thing.”

D’Amico said he started talking with contract manufacturers in 2022. Back then, the existing 20% tariffs on China were already a difficulty to consider. “Even if you built it in the United States and you were shipping units last year, you’d run into problems just because of the kind of tariffs hitting all of your bill of materials.”

The Impulse Cooktop is more vertically integrated than many big brand appliances. The sensors, power electronics, and the battery itself are all custom designed by Impulse, meaning that more of the value of the product accrues to Impulse as opposed to suppliers and manufacturers. (Think of an iPhone: It’s “designed by Apple in California,” and Apple is a much more valuable company than Foxconn, its contract manufacturer.)

But this also means that, because of its relatively small scale, Impulse is essentially sharing equipment time with other companies who use the same manufacturers. To be able to justify having their own equipment and their own manufacturing line, Impulse would need enormous scale to justify the financing costs and tariffs they would face.

“I’m not Elon,” D’Amico said. “We’re not making a million stoves this year.”