From longshot lawsuit to landmark ruling: How a family toy business took on Trump’s tariffs

By Nicholas P. Brown and Eric Cox

NEW YORK, Feb 19 (Reuters) – When Rick Woldenberg took the reins of his family’s toy business, Learning Resources Inc, nearly three decades ago, politics and litigation were not on his agenda. Then he became a central figure in one of the most significant U.S. Supreme Court rulings of the last several years. 

The court on Friday struck down President Donald Trump’s imposition of unprecedented tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, after a rash of importers, U.S. state governments and others sued.

Illinois-based Learning Resources, which imports most of the educational toys it sells from China, was one of the first small businesses to bring a lawsuit against Trump’s tariffs last April. Along with other importers, the company could now be entitled to a share of billions of dollars in refunds – although the Supreme Court did not decide how or when that may happen.

“My hope is that this ruling is an opportunity for everyone to take a breath and think about what is important and what needs to get done,” Woldenberg told Reuters on Friday. 

The White House did not immediately comment on the ruling.

Small businesses like Learning Resources and its sister company, hand2mind, represent about 97% of U.S. importers and bring in some $868 billion worth of goods annually, according to a 2025 U.S. Chamber of Commerce report that described Trump’s tariffs as a threat to such businesses’ survival.

Within days of Trump’s tariff announcement last April, Woldenberg was speaking out against the duties. In June, after Learning Resources won its lawsuit in the district court, it asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up an early review.

“I decided that I would have a lot harder time dealing with not acting than acting,” Woldenberg told Reuters in a separate interview on Thursday, adding he did not see his legal battle as political.

“It’s about taxes,” he said. “They owe us money… every American agrees we pay too much in taxes, and no one will want to pay a tax they don’t have to pay.”    

Despite Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, the issue is far from resolved. Experts say the process of getting refunds will be long and legally complex, and that Trump could try to salvage tariffs by using other legal frameworks.

FAMILY BUSINESS

For Woldenberg, toys are in the blood. Learning Resources was founded in 1984 by his mother and has roots in a business started by Woldenberg’s grandfather more than a century ago.

Together with hand2mind, it makes educational items like Alphabet Coffee Cups – which help kids distinguish uppercase and lowercase letters – and Numberblocks, a toy set for math learning inspired by a British TV series of the same name. 

Learning Resources has about 500 employees and sells in some 100 countries. Most of its production is in China – which faced some of the most crippling tariffs – and Woldenberg estimated he paid some $10 million in duties in 2025.

He also had to cut back on company expansion plans, such as adding 600,000 square feet of warehouse and office space in Illinois, and divert employees to tasks like re-engineering the company’s supply chain. Sales, marketing and product development plans changed overnight. The company went from trying to innovate to trying to react and survive. It spent less. It took in less. “We shrank last year,” he said.

A key focus of his anti-tariff campaign, he said, was to illustrate the practical challenges of what the Trump administration was pushing companies to do: move manufacturing back to the U.S.

“Moving a supply chain out of a country on an emergency basis, as if bombs are falling on your head, is a project no one is prepared for,” he said. 

To make toys, Woldenberg’s businesses use more than 30 injection machines, each weighing several tons, which pump molten plastic into thousands of steel casings. Moving it would be prohibitively expensive, he said, and next to impossible logistically, demanding dozens of flatbed trucks and a series of cranes.

There is also the issue of expertise. Woldenberg’s partner factory in China has been making toys for years, with a highly specialized workforce and the ability to meet the toy industry’s high safety standards. Replicating that, he said, could take months or years.

Now, after the ruling, Woldenberg hopes to guide the company back to normalcy after spending much of his energy this past year in court. He is hopeful the money Learning Resources has paid in tariffs will be refunded by the government.

“And as soon as they do, we’ll start spending it,” he said. “We want to run our company again.”

(Reporting by Nicholas P. Brown; editing by Peter Henderson and Nia Williams)