In this article, learn about:
Why treating “wait and see” as a safe, neutral posture is itself a growing risk
What the data shows about how supply chain leaders are reprioritizing around tariff volatility
What the “musical factories” pattern looks like across three real supplier moves
How closing the gap between a sourcing decision and its execution, the exact problem SPS Fulfillment is built to solve, determines who adapts fastest
Tariff rates have eased off their 2025 peaks, and for a lot of supply chain leaders, that’s started to feel like an opening to exhale. It isn’t one. The instinct right now is to pause sourcing decisions and wait for policy to settle before committing to anything structural. This makes sense on the surface. It’s also the wrong read on where things stand.
Certainty isn’t coming back. Tariff volatility has stopped being a periodic disruption and started being the standing condition suppliers operate under, which means “wait and see” isn’t a neutral holding pattern. It’s a slow bleed of optionality, since every quarter spent waiting is a quarter competitors spend closing the gap between deciding to move and actually moving. The suppliers pulling ahead aren't the ones who've guessed tariff policy correctly so much as they have cut enough friction out of that gap, so a pivot takes weeks instead of quarters.
Why Is “Wait and See” the Riskier Move Right Now?
The moment can look like relief from the outside. The people closest to the problem aren’t reading it that way. The Thomson Reuters 2026 Global Trade Report found that 72 percent of trade professionals now name U.S. tariff volatility as the single most impactful regulatory change they face, up from 41 percent a year earlier. Supply chain management has climbed to the top strategic priority for 68 percent of respondents, nearly double the 35 percent who said the same the year before.
The C-suite is telling a similar story. Seventy-one percent of U.S. CEOs now plan to alter their supply chains over the next three to five years, up sharply from 54 percent in last year’s survey.
Those numbers don’t read like people expecting the volatility to fade. The calm stretch is a window to build adaptive capacity, not a rest stop. Waiting it out doesn’t pause the risk, but it hands the advantage to whoever spent the same months getting faster.
Related Reading: Staying Agile in the Face of Tariffs
How Are Leading Suppliers Approaching Sourcing Diversification?
The resilience advice hasn’t changed much: diversify suppliers, keep visibility on inventory, move faster on onboarding. What’s changed is how urgently suppliers are actually following it.
McKinsey’s geopolitics research centers on assessing and diversifying supplier networks and keeping production flexible enough to shift product flows when disruptions hit. The more useful nuance sits in McKinsey’s own supply chain risk survey: tariffs have mostly accelerated resilience strategies suppliers were already pursuing, rather than sending them in a new direction. The priority is speed on approaches that already work. Nobody credible is calling for a ground-up rebuild.
That acceleration matters more given how little most suppliers can see past their own front door. Only 42 percent of global supply chain executives say they understand the operations of suppliers below their first tier, a smaller share than in 2022. Layer in how concentrated some categories still are overseas, only about 1 percent of toys and 3 percent of fashion goods get made domestically, and leaving the region simply isn’t on the table for most suppliers in these categories. Diversification and visibility are the baseline for staying in the game. Treating them as a someday upgrade is how a supplier gets caught flat.
What Does the “Musical Factories” Pattern Look Like?
Diversifying suppliers is easy to say and hard to execute, since the volatility doesn’t stop once a supplier moves, and it doesn’t move in one direction. Steve Madden is the clearest example of what that back-and-forth costs. The footwear and accessories company cut its China sourcing sharply through 2025, then moved some fall 2025 production back once it was clear alternative countries couldn’t match China on delivery, quality, or price. Fall 2025 sourcing from China landed around 30 percent, down from 71 percent in 2024. What made the reversal possible was a supplier base flexible enough to move back without starting over.
Not every supplier is solving the same version of this problem. Lindt & Sprüngli shows the contrast. Instead of rebuilding a sourcing base under pressure, the confectionery maker rerouted chocolate production from its U.S. factories to Europe to fill Canadian orders and sidestep retaliatory tariffs, using a distributed footprint it already had in place. In consumer electronics, HP expanded sourcing to Taiwan and Thailand after tariffs hit its China-based supply, cutting costs by roughly 8 percent, while acknowledging that the added complexity called for stronger supplier-management systems to run it.
Company | Category | Adaptation move | Infrastructure it required |
Steve Madden | Apparel and footwear | Cut China sourcing to about 30 percent for fall 2025, then reversed part of it when alternatives fell short on delivery and quality | A supplier base flexible enough to move back within a season |
Lindt & Sprüngli | Food and confectionery | Rerouted chocolate production from U.S. factories to Europe to fill Canadian orders | A distributed footprint that could redirect volume without rebuilding it |
HP | Consumer electronics | Expanded sourcing to Taiwan and Thailand, cutting costs by about 8 percent | Supplier-management systems built for a more complex network |
The pivot is only as good as the infrastructure underneath it. Diversifying suppliers doesn’t help much if reconnecting data with a new manufacturing partner still takes months, and it doesn’t help at all if a supplier can’t move back once the numbers change again.
Why Is the Real Bottleneck Execution, Not Strategy?
Here’s what most resilience advice skips: these moves aren’t free, and the cost usually isn’t the sourcing decision itself. Leadership can change sourcing strategy in a single meeting. Everything downstream of that decision takes months instead, like onboarding a new factory partner, re-mapping inventory and item data, and reconnecting order and shipment data across every retailer and distributor a supplier sells into.
That gap is what actually determines whether a strategy survives contact with the next tariff shift. A sourcing decision that takes weeks to execute is a real advantage. The same decision stranded behind months of manual onboarding and disconnected systems arrives too late to matter, no matter how sound it looked on the board slide.
A connected supplier network changes that math. When onboarding a new factory partner, or reconnecting item, order, and shipment data, doesn’t mean rebuilding the technical relationship from scratch each time, because the network has already handled similar onboarding hundreds of times before, the decision-to-execution gap shrinks from months to weeks. SPS Fulfillment is built around exactly that problem: getting a new supplier relationship live in weeks instead of months, so a sourcing decision doesn’t sit stranded while the systems catch up.
Related Reading: Tariff Refunds: The Operational Nightmare Businesses Aren’t Ready For
Why Is the Calm Stretch the Build Window?
Go back to the “moment of relief” framing. Tariff rates easing doesn’t mean the volatility is over, and the professionals closest to the problem don’t expect a return to stability either: most respondents in the Thomson Reuters report expect continued disruption over the next six to twelve months.
That’s exactly why this stretch matters. A calm quarter spent waiting is a calm quarter a competitor spent compressing their reaction time. The suppliers who use it that way, closing the distance between a sourcing decision and its execution, won’t be scrambling when conditions shift again. The ones who spent it waiting will be.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is tariff volatility a temporary situation or a lasting shift?
The data points toward lasting. Trade professionals in the Thomson Reuters 2026 Global Trade Report expect continued disruption over the next six to twelve months, and supply chain management has become a top strategic priority for a majority of respondents rather than a passing concern.
What should supply chain leaders prioritize right now?
Supplier diversification and inventory visibility still matter, but the research points to a bigger lever: shortening the time between a sourcing decision and its execution across onboarding, inventory, and order data.
Why does execution speed matter more than predicting tariff policy?
Tariff policy has proven difficult to predict, and the suppliers adapting best haven’t been the ones who guessed correctly. They’ve been the ones who could act on a decision in weeks rather than months, regardless of which way policy moved next.
What does the “musical factories” pattern mean?
It describes suppliers moving production in response to tariffs, then moving it again, sometimes back to where they started, as conditions shift. Steve Madden’s move out of China and partial return is the clearest recent example.
Want to Close the Gap Between a Sourcing Decision and Its Execution?
The suppliers moving fastest right now aren’t the ones with the best tariff forecast. They’re the ones who built a supplier network that keeps sourcing decisions and their execution close together instead of months apart. SPS Fulfillment helps new supplier and retailer relationships go live in weeks, not months, so the next sourcing decision doesn’t get stranded behind onboarding and reconnection work.
Not ready to talk to a supply chain expert yet? The Supply Chain Source has more on building a supplier network that can move as fast as the decisions made about it.