Good morning! It’s senior editor Claire Zillman, standing in for Emma who is on vacation. In today’s newsletter: Pam Bondi is subpoenaed, Lululemon interim co-CEO Meghan Frank sees momentum despite weaker-than-expected forecasts, and Nanit CEO Anushka Salinas talks to me about Trump’s tariffs and the messy refund process.
Ever since President Donald Trump enacted tariffs last year, CEOs have been hesitant to criticize his trademark economic policy. “There’s no upside in speaking out,” one CEO told my colleague Diane Brady.
Not Anushka Salinas, CEO of Nanit, maker of smart baby monitors that are popular with millennial parents. (Nanit raised $50 million from Springcoast Partners, Upfront Ventures, and JVP in December.) Salinas, former Rent the Runway COO, publicly opposed the levies and the burden they piled on to her customers. Nanit imports hard-to-manufacture cameras from Malaysia and was therefore subject to a 19% tariff.
In May, she framed the tariffs on Nanit’s products as incongruous with the Trump administration’s efforts to boost births; tariffs risked adding to the already astronomical cost of raising children. Trump has proposed easing families’ costs with measures like a national baby bonus, but Salinas offered a simpler solution: “Remove the tariffs on essential baby goods.”
The Supreme Court’s tariff ruling in February did just that; not only for baby goods, but all products taxed under an emergency economic powers act. Now Salinas is speaking out about the messy refund process and her effort to get her company’s money back.
Salinas declined to specify how much Nanit had paid in tariffs but said it did not pass the costs on to customers. (Its Smart Baby Monitor System retails for $290.) Instead, the higher costs narrowed the company’s margins and cut into how much it invested in products.
Still, filing for a refund wasn’t a no-brainer. “We did take a beat to consider what the best path was going to be,” she told me. As CEO of a smaller business—Nanit has 150 employees—Salinas had to weigh the legal costs of filing a refund (Nanit has retained outside counsel) against the size of the refund itself. Ultimately, Nanit sued for a refund on March 5 in the Court of International Trade.
“If we’re able to get the refund, it’s a meaningful amount of money that we would reinvest in the business and hire people and do things that help move the economy forward,” she said.
Since the SCOTUS ruling, however, Trump has reimposed a 15% tariff, so Nanit is facing higher costs again. Given the experience last year, Salinas says her team is well-positioned to manage the business with such a headwind.
She says Nanit is encouraged by the Trump administration’s support for families and doesn’t see the refund filing as an ideological statement: “We’re just participating in a legal action that’s out there that’s non-political.”
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
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PARTING WORDS
“Don't compare your timeline to the person next to you or what someone's achieved and whether you've achieved it or not.”
— Oksana Masters, who just won her 24th Paralympic medal in Milan Cortina.
