Steve Ross walked across his sail loft in a half-slide, navigating the slip-smooth floor in socks but no shoes.

“Trying not to track the rain in,” he said.

This is the working floor of Ullman Sails Annapolis/Chesapeake Bay, where Ross works with triangles of polyester, carbon fiber and other fabrics.

Bags of sails and rolls of uncut material fill the shelves, and sails in midrepair wait on tables for the next stitch. Two sewing pits line one wall, where Ross sits in a wooden chair to pull material flat on the floor through industrial machines.

Craftspeople like Ross rely on years of expertise to measure, cut and sew. They design and repair thousands of sails every year.

But he easily counts off the ones he makes in the same time, start to finish.

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“Three.”

The rest of Ross’ sails are ordered from the Ullman factory in South Africa. Other nearby lofts use factories in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and South China.

His job and those thousands of miles away are worlds apart.

“It’s the difference between being a mechanic who understands how this works and working on an assembly line,” Ross said.

Annapolis once occupied a quirky corner of American manufacturing, a center of Chesapeake Bay sailmaking. By 2010, though, no sail loft in America’s Sailing Capital was regularly making new sails.

No matter what tariffs President Donald Trump slaps on imported goods, no matter how much Americans pay for everything made overseas, anyone in manufacturing will tell you that most manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back.

And, although Trump doesn’t have sailmaking on his agenda, it’s a small example of why tariffs won’t work.

“It’s an incredibly backward, shortsighted idea,” said David Flynn, sales manager at Quantum Sail Design Group in Annapolis. “No economist, no businessman worth their salt would propose bringing sailmaking back.”

Annapolis made lots of stuff over the years — glass bottles, ice cream, even washing machines. The Navy had a development plant across the Severn River.

Northrop Grumman still makes big things nearby, churning out radar units in Linthicum and Navy prototypes at its plant by the Bay Bridge.

A boatyard on Spa Creek turned out workboats, warships and luxury yachts under different owners for most of the 20th century. When it folded in 1974, smaller businesses around it blossomed as recreational boating boomed.

Sailmaking was one of them. At its peak, Annapolis companies employed a few hundred skilled people making sails in a handful of one- and two-story lofts.

“It grew from a cluster of mom-and-pop facilities making a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of sails a year,” said Flynn, who started with Quantum when it was locally owned. “It got to a point of peak production in the ’90s.”

In those days, Annapolis sail lofts designed sails for the Olympics and around-the-world races as well as local sailors.

Sailboats carry different sails for different conditions. A new one might cost $2,000 to $12,000, $30,000 for something big and far more for a full set or something exotic.

Competitive sailing, from local yacht club series to the Olympics, propelled expansion and consolidation. Small lofts in different parts of the country started combining to form national and then international companies.

“What we evolved from originally was an independently owned loft in Annapolis, physically making sails,” Flynn said. “Gradually, we realized there was just no way that was cost-effective.”

Sales, design and service remained. The big work — creating custom sailcloth, making structural details and assembly-line production for global demand — moved overseas.

Greg Koski, who owns Ullman Sails in Annapolis and licenses it to Ross, does a little manufacturing in his Cleveland and Buffalo, New York, lofts. Other lofts do it as well, but it has limits.

“When we have a 60-footer or a big catamaran main, or some huge sail that would slow our production down, we would need more people,” he said. “We would need more help. We need more staff and everything to complete that, to keep the wheels spinning.”

The idea behind Trump tariffs is to make overseas-built goods, such as sails, so expensive that American companies become competitive despite the domestic costs. Koski has considered it.

He could enlarge his lofts or find real estate for a new one. He could hire a workforce at $25 an hour compared to $5 in South Africa, and get visas to bring overseas supervisors here for training.

He’d have to find investors or loans and could lose it all if Trump’s history of chickening out after tough talk means overseas competitors regain their advantage.

“Who’s to say in a month from now, two months, three months, four months, a year, or whatever, the tariffs go away?” Koski said. “I mean, we have no idea.”

Large-scale sailmaking in Annapolis presents all those problems and more.

There are at least eight sail lofts in Annapolis, mostly in Eastport — a waterman’s village long transformed into a millionaires’ playground.

The city protects maritime businesses, but the residential character, roads, the availability and cost of land all make a factory impossible.

You could look elsewhere on the bay. There is space on the Eastern Shore. But many of the people taking repetitive factory work in rural communities are being deported under Trump’s immigration policies.

If Ullman were to build a factory, even if tariffs held, it still might never become profitable.

“Good luck to them,” Flynn said.

What remains in Annapolis after globalization is a sailmaking center that rarely makes sails but still provides services and jobs.

Tariffs won’t change that. But they could damage it.

North Sails, Doyle Sailmakers and Quantum are all owned by a British investment fund, Oakley Capital. They have started itemizing tariff costs.

If higher costs push some sailors out, consolidation might not be far behind.

“It’s a worldwide market worth $300 million,” Flynn said. “If you want to make money, do something else.”