IEEPA REFUNDS ARE ROLLING
Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with consumer brands, customs brokers, trade attorneys, and operators trying to understand what’s actually happening with IEEPA-related refund opportunities.
And honestly, most importers are still pretty confused.
Some companies think refunds are guaranteed. Others think there’s no chance at all. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, and the situation is still evolving quickly.
What is becoming very clear, though, is that many brands have millions of dollars tied up in duties, tariffs, and import inefficiencies that nobody has really been paying attention to until now.
That’s one of the big reasons we started Evana.
At first, we were hyper-focused on Duty Drawback & IEEPA refunds. But the deeper we got into customer import data, the more we realized this problem is much bigger than one refund opportunity.
Most SMB and mid-market consumer brands are flying blind when it comes to import optimization.
They don’t know:
If they’ve overpaid duties
If they qualify for drawback
Whether their classifications are optimized
If they’re missing free trade agreement opportunities
If their broker is making costly mistakes
Or how much money is quietly leaking out of their supply chain every year
This week alone, we helped one well-known apparel brand recover roughly $267,000.
We also worked with a major electronics company and recovered nearly $300,000 for them.
And the interesting part is that both companies initially came to us focused on one issue, but once we got deeper into the data, we uncovered additional opportunities they didn’t even know existed.
At the rate things are moving right now, we expect to soon be processing over $1,000,000 per week in IEEPA-related refunds for brands while helping minimize compliance risk and uncover broader duty optimization opportunities along the way.
The old way of managing this stuff is fragmented, manual, reactive, and honestly pretty outdated.
Our belief at Evana is that import optimization should eventually feel almost automatic.
Connect your import data.
See risks and opportunities instantly.
Recover money where possible.
Reduce future exposure.
Continuously optimize over time.
Almost like having a 24/7 trade optimization team running quietly in the background.
And importantly, we’re trying to approach this in a practical, low-risk way.
Not every importer will qualify for every refund opportunity. Not every claim is straightforward. There’s still legal uncertainty around certain areas of IEEPA. But sitting still and ignoring your import data entirely probably isn’t the right strategy either.
If I were running a consumer brand importing into the U.S. today, I’d be doing three things immediately:
Gathering and organizing historical import data
Understanding total IEEPA exposure and refund eligibility
Looking beyond refunds and auditing the entire import operation for optimization opportunities
I think the next few years are going to create a massive shift in how brands think about global trade, duties, and customs compliance.
The brands that treat this as a strategic financial lever, instead of just back-office paperwork, are going to have a real advantage.
