Wendy Tanada has been worried about Christmas since before May.
Her company, HFT International, exports as many as 60 shipping containers of Northwest premium evergreen trees to countries across the Pacific Ocean in time for Christmas.
They’re all arriving in their ports of call now.
While she might be holding her breath until the first week of December, she said all the stress is worth it.
“I still love Christmas,” Tanada said. “It is joyful to see the final results, though the process is challenging and tiring.”
HFT International is based in Portland, and exports a large amount of Oregon and Washington trees to countries like Singapore, Japan and even Dubai. Tanada said the farms they work with begin cutting some trees in September so that they can make it as far as Dubai by December.
“These go into airports like Singapore Airport or Hong Kong airport,” Tanada said. “And then they are going to very iconic high-end 5-star, 6-star hotels … high end shopping malls.”
Her company ships mostly noble firs that are between four and 10 feet tall. She said her Asian customers love the smell and the look of the very full and symmetrical trees.
“Most of the time our last batch flies out to Maldives, the tropical island,” Tanada said. “This year it’s going to the Waldorf Astoria in Maldives. And so when that is done, we feel a big relief, cause we complete most of the work.”
She’s been playing international elf for nearly 30 years. She makes sure trees from the Northwest get to Japan, Dubai, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Singapore, Maldives, Korea and the Philippines. In order to make that happen, she has to fight disasters like typhoons and tsunamis. This year, on top of the normal difficulties of shipping internationally and customer demands, she’s been slammed with tougher trade barriers and new tariffs.
Tanada said exports are doing alright these days, but Trump Administration trade war tariffs are sawing into profits.
“When each side is escalating the tariffs, the trees will have higher tariffs going over there,” Tanada said. “We’re the direct victim when this happens. They pay high prices to buy premium products from the Northwest. If the tariff adds on it, it's huge. A 10% increase is huge, because the price was already very high.”
On top of that, her top foreign customers are more reluctant to visit the United States because they fear getting detained.
Tanada is used to tackling big challenges, though. She once shipped a 35-foot behemoth cut from near Silverton, Oregon. Tanada got the premium evergreen flown to Hong Kong just in time for Christmas.
