I actually also used LLM to provide the draft texts which I then reviewed context-wise. However, as I also responded to some other comments, I will (actually have already) changed to not use LLM anymore. Instead, I am drafting all my responses on my own and just have LLM polish my English :-)

Hey huppakee. Thanks for your feedback. I like your suggestion about using llm to practice my English skills. I will most probably try to do so. I believe it could be quite more efficient rather than using those common apps like babble or dualingo, because it the LLM can be told to be super-specific to me! As to browle.com: yes, I have been using LLM quite a lot to do the research - as you can see I am now at more than 900 brands that were analysed. I could not have done this research without LLM actually. But, I set the rules, the boundaries- therefore it acts on my behalf. My personal motivation on browle is actually to make us all more aware about our decisions when we buy something. My personal opinion: Europe is a great place to live and to work. We should be proud about what we are, what we do and what we stand for. When I break a small part of this down to “my personal buy behaviour” I try as much as possible to favour EU made products.

OK, thanks for your feedback. And I am not taking it as a personal attack - no worries. I am writing this and the reply before, completely on my own - without any help of LLM or other tools :-) It may be the English that I am used to apply from my normal work in business! Have a good one!

Yes, indeed. I received similar feedback from others as well. I believe you are fully correct. I actually used LLM to review my comments/posts. I got your point and fully agree with you. I will make sure, that in moving forward I will only use LLM to a strict minimum and keep my own personal language (as non-English-native speaker ;-)). Thank you very much for this, trolske!

Hi asudox. No, I am not an LLM. But I did use LLM for reviewing my posts (especially because I am not English-native speaker). But I fully get your point and I will make sure moving forward to keep the LLM review to a strict minimum, and will put more focus on my own, natural language :) Thanks a lot for pointing it out to me! Much appreciated.

not a bad idea :-)

That matches what we keep running into. One line made in Europe with the rest offshore is common enough that we ended up building a badge for it instead of treating made in Europe as a yes or no question. Your welted list is mostly in there already: Crockett & Jones, Tricker’s, Paraboot, Carmina and TLB Mallorca, plus Cheaney, Solovair, Crown Northampton, Heschung, Ludwig Reiter, and Heinrich Dinkelacker whose Budapesters really are made in Budapest. Loake and Grenson are in with the badge, since only their Made in England ranges qualify. Goral, Berwick, Vass and J.M. Weston are missing, so they go on the list to check. The shetland side is the real gap. William Lockie in Hawick is in there and nothing else you named is. Jamieson’s, Harley of Scotland, Bosie and Howlin all go on the list. Knitwear is thinner than footwear in the directory and your comment makes that hard to miss. Each one gets checked the same way, a public source from the brand saying where the product is actually made. If it fails, it goes on the not listed page with the reason rather than quietly vanishing. Baracuta and Gola included.

Thanks for the running shoe link too. Factory ownership is a different question from country of manufacture, but the New Balance UK factory is exactly the single line case that badge exists for, so that goes on the list as well.

Thanks, glad it is useful. Honestly there is no story. It just sounded decent to me and the domain was free. The one deliberate part was that it had to mean nothing in particular. The site runs in English, German and French, so an obvious name like buyeu or madeineurope would have read fine to English speakers and clumsy to everyone else. A word that means nothing is at least equally neutral in all three.

If you do, the hardest part is deciding what counts. Owned in Europe, founded in Europe and manufactured in Europe give you three very different lists, and a lot of brands only make it into one of them. I settled on production location as the only thing that decides a listing, and put ownership on the page as a separate fact, because people kept reading one as the other. Everything I have is public with the source on each entry, so lift whatever is useful.

That is what I ended up doing, so thanks for the push. The three wrong lines are struck through in the post now, with the correct version right underneath. Nothing deleted, and you get the right info without having to scroll into the comments.

Fair, and that is roughly why the Salomon entry got rewritten after this thread. The French factory is real, but it builds selected models while most of the range still comes from Asia, so the entry says that now instead of “made in France”. A tag is only as good as the rules behind it, and for footwear those rules let a lot through. If you ever find a tag that contradicts something I have listed, send it over. That is the kind of check I cannot do from a company website.

The full list is the site itself: all 631 are on browle.com, and the evidence link sits on every entry’s page — the ten in the post were just the ones that made good reading. Categories, countries and search are the ways in.

There’s no open repo right now, and corrections don’t need one (or any account): since this week there’s a form at browle.com/en/suggest. It works for new brands and for “this entry is wrong” alike — an evidence link is the one thing I really need. This thread alone produced several corrections and two shipped features, so the channel demonstrably works.

On nonprofit: it’s a one-person project funded by disclosed affiliate links on some outbound buttons — the disclosure is in the footer, and listings are never affected by it; that bar is public on the site. Public or consumer-protection funding is a kind thought, but I’d rather keep earning trust with sources first and think about structures later.

Both things from this thread are now live.

The suggestion form: browle.com/en/suggest (also /de and /fr). Brand name plus an evidence link is all it takes, no account needed, and every suggestion goes through the same verification as any listed brand. You asked for exactly this, so it seemed wrong to keep pointing people at an email address.

And ownership is now its own field on brand pages, separate from the manufacturing facts. The first batch is the cases this thread raised: Birkenstock (L Catterton, 62.4% per their SEC annual report), Salomon’s parent Amer Sports (Anta largest shareholder at 41.7%), Beyerdynamic (Cosonic), SIGG (Haers), plus Lowa (Tecnica Group) and Duralex, which went the other direction and became an employee cooperative in 2024. Each dated and sourced, and the page says plainly: ownership is shown for context, listing stays based only on where products are made.

Thanks for the push. Tips from this thread built most of what shipped this week.

Your experience checks out. Nearly everything Salomon sells, jackets included, is made in Asia. The French factory is real but builds select shoe models only; my entry was too loose about that until this thread, and now says so plainly.

On ownership: Salomon belongs to Amer Sports, originally Finnish, and Amer’s largest shareholder since the 2019 buyout is Anta Sports from China (PromKingJosh has the numbers upthread, around 44%, plus a small Tencent stake). So not wholly Chinese-owned, but Chinese-anchored, yes.

The directory deliberately answers one narrow question, where the product is manufactured, and not who owns the brand. Both matter when you decide what to buy; they’re just different facts, and blurring them is how “European brand” got so fuzzy in the first place. The same came up with Birkenstock upthread, majority-owned by a US fund since 2021. Showing ownership as its own field is on my list for exactly that reason.

Yes to both, that’s the plan.

Every entry shows a “last verified” date, and re-checks update it. In practice threads like this one are the fastest correction mechanism: three fixes from this thread went into the data the same day, including the SIGG scope and Sennheiser’s Tullamore factory.

For suggestions, contact@browle.com works today and goes straight into the review queue. A proper suggestion form on the site is on the roadmap. Suggestions only get listed once there’s a public source for where the products are made, which is also why some famous names sit on the “not listed” page instead.

Both of your tips checked out, and both are in the directory now. Thanks.

Arcos: their own pages document the Albacete plants, knives since 1734, around 75,000 pieces a day. Listed.

And you’re right about SIGG, which means my post above overstates it. Their Frauenfeld factory still makes the aluminium bottles, and SIGG marks the Swiss-made ones with a red Swiss cross; other lines come from outside suppliers. So it’s not “no longer made in Switzerland”, it’s “check for the cross”. The entry is scoped that way now.

You’re right, and my directory entry was too loose about it. Fixed today.

Most Salomon volume is built in Asia, Vietnam included, exactly as you say. What surprised me was the exception: the automated ASF 4.0 factory in Ardoix that builds select models 100% in France. That’s a small slice of the range, notable because it exists at all, not because it’s the norm. The entry now carries the “specific lines” badge and says plainly that the bulk of the range is still made in Asia.

On Nestlé: no argument here, see my reply upthread. The list answers where something is made, not whether the company deserves your money.

Two corrections, both from this thread.

1. The disclosure below says “no tracking”. That was wrong. The newsletter signup form was a beehiiv embed sitting on every page, and inside its iframe beehiiv loaded Google Tag Manager, a PerimeterX script and Google Fonts. browle’s own code never had any of it, but that distinction doesn’t help you as a reader — it loaded either way. Fixed the same day: the form now loads only if you click it, nothing third-party runs on a normal page view, and the privacy page names all of it outright.

2. The SIGG line above is wrong. They still run their own factory in Frauenfeld and mark Swiss-made products with the red Swiss cross — the range is split, not moved abroad. It’s now a scoped listing on browle instead of sitting on the not-listed page.

Both were caught by commenters here, which is roughly the best argument for posting this stuff in public. Leaving the original text standing rather than quietly rewriting it.

Hadn’t seen it — thanks, that’s a good neighbour project. Different question than mine (how it’s built to fail vs. where it’s built), but the same instinct.

Electronics is browle’s thinnest category by a wide margin, and it’s the one where verification is hardest — “designed in” and “assembled in” do most of the marketing work in that industry, and very few makers will name the plant.

I’ll go through your list properly. The ones worth flagging to me are any where the manufacturer names the actual site rather than the country: that’s the difference between something I can list and something I can’t.