How Family Toy Business Took Trump’s Charges

When Rick Woldenberg took over his family’s toy business, Learning Resources Inc, nearly three decades ago, politics and litigation were not on his agenda. He then became a key figure in one of the most important decisions of the US Supreme Court in the last few years.

A court on Friday overturned President Donald Trump’s decision to impose unprecedented tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, after an outcry from importers, the US government and others.

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

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

The White House did not immediately comment on the decision.

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

A few days after Trump’s tariffs were announced last April, Woldenberg was speaking out against the jobs. In June, after Learning Resources won its case in district court, it asked the US Supreme Court for immediate review.

“I’ve decided that I’m going to have a much harder time not acting than acting,” Woldenberg told Reuters in a separate interview on Thursday, adding that he doesn’t see his legal battle as political.

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

Despite Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, the issue is far from settled. Experts say the process of getting a refund will be long and complicated legally, and that Trump could try to rescue the tax through other legal frameworks.

FAMILY BUSINESS

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

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

Learning Resources has about 500 employees and sells in about 100 countries. Most of its production is in China — which has faced crippling tariffs — and Woldenberg estimated that it paid nearly $10 million in jobs by 2025.

He also had to scale back the company’s expansion plans, such as adding 600,000,000 square feet of warehouse and office space in Illinois, and shift employees to tasks such as restructuring the company’s supply chain. Sales, marketing and product development programs have changed in an instant. The company went from trying to innovate to trying to react and survive. Spend less money. It took a little. “We decreased last year,” he said.

The focus of his anti-tariff campaign, he said, was to show the practical challenges of what the Trump administration was pushing companies to do: bring manufacturing back to the US.

“Putting the supply chain out of the country on an emergency basis, as if bombs were falling on your head, is a task that no one is prepared for,” he said.

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

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

Now, after the verdict, Woldenberg hopes to steer the company back to normal after spending much of his energy this past year in court. He hopes that the money paid by Learning Resources through tariffs will be returned by the government.

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

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