Hang on— the wargamer article claims that's what's happening, but the article announcing the closing doesn't say that at all.
link
That article blames a sales drop of 4% over the previous year. It only mentions one international consideration— currency valuation shift— and the rest is tied to, frankly, what reads like bad business decisions and carrying waaaaay too much debt ($5.4 billion in debt for less than $3 USD billion in sales ??? Who's kidding whom?). And there was also a decrease in demand from automobile companies as well. I note also that the reports is from April of 2025, well before any tariff effects could have had any impact on the market!
So something is a bit off here.
The blog does mention raw material "dumping" by Asian suppliers to undercut domestic sources, which meant that company was acquiring these materials on the cheap prior. And it talks about retaliatory tariffs… but who the heck is buying "greenstuff" in China from an American manufacturer? Chinese plumbers (and mini sculptors) can't get it locally? Unlikely. In fact, I suspect this same company has Asian manufacturing sites, which would face no "retaliatory tariffs."
I smell a rat. And the rat is a company that badly handled its finances, got itself into massive debt, and now the executive rats are looking for "external forces" to blame so they won't get the canning they obviously deserve.
Meanwhile, I seriously doubt they're the only source of a commonly used, rather generic product. (Patent protection has vanished on this a long time ago.)
So instead y'all can sculpt figures from the BS pouring out of this company's PR department— ‘cause it's that thick.
