Lechery Review, July 31, 2025

Why Lechery Hates Orange Chicken Tacos:

How Trump’s Tariffs Nearly Killed Our Sex Toy Blog

If you noticed Lechery Review went dead quiet between April and July 2025, you weren’t imagining things. We weren’t on vacation. We weren’t rebranding. We were getting absolutely crushed by the Trump tariffs.

When the U.S. decided to crank up tariffs on Canadian goods and Canada fired back with their own, it created a trade war that might not have made headlines for “adult content creators”, but we felt it immediately. Lechery Review is proudly Canadian, but most of our suppliers, collaborators, and brands we review are American.

Whether we’re buying a toy ourselves from an indie maker or getting a sponsor to cover the cost, almost everything we test crosses that very expensive border.

And thanks to the tariffs, that border got a lot more expensive.

(Photo: Shutterstock)

Not Buying in Bulk? You’re Paying the Price

We don’t buy wholesale. We’re not a storefront. We buy toys like any regular person would, one at a time, to test, photograph, review, and sometimes yell about on the internet. Under normal circumstances, that works. But when the U.S. tacked on 25% tariffs and Canada matched them, plus GST and duties, suddenly that $60 toy became closer to $100 once it landed at our doorstep. And that’s assuming it could land here; some suppliers straight-up ghosted us starting in March.

We noticed it almost overnight: companies that used to support our reviews went silent. Small indie shops we’d regularly communicated with suddenly scrambled to find solutions or paused international orders altogether. By the time April hit, we couldn’t afford to buy anything new, and nobody was sending samples. That’s when we hit pause.

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How the Trade War Broke Our Workflow

Between April and July 2025, Lechery Review was in complete shutdown mode. No reviews, no unboxings, no janky PNG animations of Lechery Sceleris flailing through cyberspace. Just silence. We didn’t want it that way; we simply couldn’t afford the product costs anymore. Even our mascot felt like he had a new hole to fill, and not the good kind.

And let’s be clear: we’re a small, independent blog. We’re not running this off ad revenue or a VC-funded toy empire. We rely on slow growth, community support, and the occasional sponsored review to keep going. When even sponsors bailed, our content dried up.

We finally resumed in July, after some creative problem-solving (and a few kind brands willing to work with us again). But that three-month gap? It wasn’t a break. It was survival mode.

(Photo: vecteezy)

Short Staffed and Stretched Thin

As if supply shortages and import nightmares weren’t enough, the trade disruption hit us personally, too. With months of inactivity and no new content, we lost a key team member. This wasn’t just a morale hit; it also reduced the diversity of insights we’re able to offer in our testing.

Our reviews have always aimed to be as comprehensive as possible, and losing a voice in that mix is a genuine setback.

We’re still here, still reviewing, but rebuilding a thoughtful and trusted team takes time. The good news? We’re rolling out some long-overdue upgrades to our format very soon, and we’re excited to get weird with it again.

It Wasn’t Just Us

We weren’t alone. The whole Canadian sex toy industry felt this hit. Retailers who depend on U.S. inventory were suddenly stuck with steeper costs or delays. Educators and sex bloggers who relied on sample kits saw their pipelines shut off. Even major U.S. brands like Dame Products warned that they were adding tariff surcharges and struggling to absorb the added costs.

If you’re wondering how much wiggle room a Canadian adult reviewer has, it’s not a lot. Canada’s import exemptions are tiny — packages over $20 CAD are taxed, and that’s before the tariff multipliers. Most toys are well over that threshold, and the ones that aren’t... well, you don’t want us reviewing those.

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So What Now?

At Lechery Review, the aftermath of this trade disruption has made one thing clear: rebuilding will take time. While products are slowly becoming accessible again, the ripple effects of these tariffs linger, especially for indie reviewers like us who purchase items individually, not wholesale. The challenges of importing from the U.S. haven’t disappeared, and neither has the pressure it places on small, community-driven blogs like ours.

We also took a hit behind the scenes. The sudden stall in activity earlier this year led to the loss of one of our team members, shrinking our testing group and narrowing the range of experiences we’re able to include in reviews. With only two testers remaining, our capacity is limited but not gone. We’re easing back into our regular review schedule and working toward long-term solutions.

In the meantime, Lechery Review is far from done. We’ve got upgrades coming to our format, improvements to our workflow, and a strong desire to make up for lost time. The spark is still here, and we’re ready to keep the fire burning.