China hasn’t exited global supply chains, it’s just being forced to share the stage.

In this episode, Ram and Bhavin Shah of Bioworld Merchandising dig into how brands should react to tariffs and a rewired sourcing map. Demand is slightly softer but very much alive; consumers are trading down in some areas, but still spending on what they care about. The real shift is behind the scenes: brands must rebalance, not abandon China, keep fast-turn, time-sensitive items there, while building parallel capacity in India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Central America and others, then “cost-average” across the mix.

Bhavin argues you can’t just copy-paste a China product into a new country; you redesign into each region’s strengths, squeeze efficiency with tech and tariff engineering, and invest daily in new factory relationships (including small test orders and audits). He expects holiday sales to be down ~4–5%, not collapsing, and is blunt that section 321 mostly spoiled consumers: serious, by-the-book brands will survive by treating supply chain as a competitive weapon, not a cost line.