For brands and retailers, 2025 was less about one big tariff moment and more about constant uncertainty over what would change next.
New measures, revisions, and retaliatory responses kept costs and plans in motion. Margins tightened, landed costs were harder to predict, and pricing, merchandising, and sales teams recalibrated constantly, with little clarity on what would stick.
Despite that pressure, 2025 rarely produced a single moment of rupture. Faced with shifting policy and unclear timelines, many organizations relied on short-term defenses: pulling inventory forward, absorbing costs where possible, and delaying pricing or assortment changes while waiting for clearer signals.
2025 functioned as a transition year. Brands and retailers learned how to operate under persistent trade friction, often by buying time. Those choices stabilized performance in the moment and set the stage for tougher decisions in 2026.
What changes in 2026 - Why the operating context starts to shift
If 2025 was defined by managing uncertainty, 2026 is when its consequences become harder to avoid.
Many of the short-term defenses brands and retailers relied on last year begin to unwind. Inventory positions normalize. Contracts reset. Pricing and promotion plans face fewer places to hide volatility.
At the same time, trade policy remains fragmented rather than resolved. Tariffs are not disappearing, and in some cases they become more structural. For brands and retailers, that shifts the challenge from reacting to policy changes toward operating within a permanently more complex trade environment.
That brings tariffs closer to the commercial core. Tariffs start influencing assortment mix, supplier strategy, and pricing cadence, not just landed costs. Cost increases that were once deferred become harder to absorb without margin trade-offs or consumer-facing changes.
What brands and retailers should watch in 2026
1. Pricing cadence becomes a growing challenge
The question is no longer whether prices need to change, but how often. Annual pricing resets are increasingly misaligned with tariff-related costs that shift unevenly across categories, suppliers, and regions.
This is already showing up in practice. A 2025 retail industry analysis pointed to the same shift: cost volatility, including tariff-driven changes, is pushing retailers toward more agile pricing approaches tied to real-time cost signals rather than fixed annual cycles. As buffers thin in 2026, that shift accelerates.
For brands, this is not about losing control of pricing. It is about maintaining a deliberate relative price position as pricing moves more frequently across the category and at key retail partners.
What to watch for: shifts in relative price gaps within the category, including how often competitors and retailers adjust price positioning.
2. Assortment discipline turns into a margin lever
Persistent cost pressure exposes products that survive on legacy logic rather than contribution. SKUs with thin margins, complex sourcing, or limited pricing power become harder to justify when volatility persists.
This is not about aggressive range cuts. It is about identifying which products genuinely earn their complexity.
What to watch for: quiet assortment simplification, particularly in long-tail ranges.
3. Supplier optionality outweighs lowest unit cost
As volatility becomes more structural, predictability carries a premium. Brands and retailers increasingly value suppliers that offer flexibility, transparency, and reliability, even when unit costs are higher.
This often shows up as dual sourcing, shorter commitments, and more explicit trade-offs between margin and resilience.
What to watch for: sourcing strategies that explicitly price in risk, not just unit cost.
Tariffs increasingly influence commercial decisions through how they are applied and enforced. Reuters has reported that tighter enforcement of tariff classifications and country-of-origin rules is forcing importers to reassess sourcing choices, because how a product is classified or where it is deemed to originate can materially change the tariff applied and, in turn, the landed cost.
Tariff exposure is no longer just a finance or customs calculation after suppliers are chosen. It feeds back into commercial decisions about which suppliers, product designs, or sourcing locations make sense under current tariff regimes. For EU-facing businesses, CBAM adds a carbon-linked cost layer from 2026. It is EU-specific, but it already changes supplier conversations for that market.
What to watch for: tariff exposure and enforcement risk carrying more weight in supplier selection and assortment decisions, particularly for EU-facing businesses.
When tariff-related costs shift unevenly, brands and retailers that communicate clearly tend to preserve more commercial flexibility. Rather than reacting at the point of price change, early and transparent communication helps partners understand which cost pressures are structural, which are temporary, and how trade-offs are being managed.
This approach has tangible commercial benefits. FleishmanHillard has noted that as tariffs affect multiple cost lines at once, companies that explain pricing and cost decisions proactively are better positioned to maintain trust and negotiate outcomes with partners and customers.
In practice, this means clearer conversations around pricing, promotions, and assortment decisions, with fewer last-minute compromises. Communication does not remove tariff pressure, but it can meaningfully improve how that pressure is absorbed across the value chain.
What to watch for: brands and retailers that communicate earlier and more clearly about tariff-driven cost pressures retaining greater flexibility in pricing and partnership discussions.
Tariffs as a leadership test, not a policy problem
By 2026, tariffs are unlikely to feel new. What will feel new is how exposed some decisions become once the buffers built in 2025 wear off.
For brands and retailers, tariffs are no longer experienced primarily as a sourcing or finance issue. It shows up in pricing cadence, assortment discipline, supplier strategy, compliance choices, and how clearly teams communicate trade-offs. Tariffs are now a test of alignment and decision-making under uncertainty.
The companies that navigate this period best will not be the ones that predicted policy perfectly. They will be the ones that recognized where pressure was building, adjusted deliberately, and stayed clear-eyed about their relative position in the market.
If 2025 taught brands and retailers how to buy time, 2026 will test what they choose to do with it.