Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)B

browle

@ browle @feddit.uk

3
26
1 mo. ago

  • I verified where 600+ "European" brands are actually made — here's what surprised me

  • Suggestions are the main way this grows, so yes — keep them coming.

    Fjällräven is a good example of the hard case: strong Swedish identity, production largely elsewhere, and no per-line statement from them that I can point at. Without that there's nothing to verify in either direction, which makes it a not-listed candidate rather than a listing. That page exists precisely so brands like this don't just quietly go missing.

  • I verified where 600+ "European" brands are actually made — here's what surprised me

  • You're right and I got this one wrong — thank you.

    I re-checked SIGG's own pages. Their Swiss Made page refers to "our factory in Frauenfeld" and says the red Swiss cross logo "identifies products that are manufactured in Switzerland", with the origin stated on the product or the packaging. Their Swissness page says they keep investing in the Frauenfeld factory, while also working with outside manufacturers "regardless of where they are produced".

    So the accurate picture is a split range — part still made in Frauenfeld, part not — and not "no longer made in Switzerland", which is what browle's not-listed page says and what I repeated in this post. That's overstated and I'm correcting it; a split range is what the site handles as a scoped entry, which is how it should have been filed.

    Arcos: noted, and it came up twice in this thread — Albacete, stated on their own site. It goes in the queue.

  • I verified where 600+ "European" brands are actually made — here's what surprised me

  • Fair, and I don't want the list read as an endorsement.

    browle answers one narrow question — where is this actually manufactured — and deliberately doesn't rank companies on ethics, because that's a judgement you'd want to make yourself and we'd almost certainly draw the lines differently. Nespresso is in there because the manufacturing claim is unusually verifiable, not because I think Nestlé is a good corporate citizen. The baby-formula history and the water extraction are real and well documented.

    "Made here" and "behaves well" are separate axes, and a directory that quietly merged them would be doing the same thing I'm complaining about with "designed in".

  • I verified where 600+ "European" brands are actually made — here's what surprised me

  • Both true, and worth stating plainly: Birkenstock has been majority-owned by L Catterton, a US private equity firm, since 2021, and beyerdynamic was sold to Cosonic — a Chinese OEM that builds headphones for Philips, JBL and Beats — in June 2025 for a reported €122m.

    What browle checks is where a product is manufactured, not who owns the brand. Those are genuinely different questions and I should be clearer about that on the site. On the manufacturing side both still hold: Birkenstock's Görlitz site is still being expanded, and the Cosonic deal was explicitly structured around keeping the Heilbronn production and the "Handmade in Heilbronn" marking, with the existing management staying in place.

    Whether that survives the next few years is exactly what a directory like this should re-check rather than assume — every entry carries a "last verified" date for that reason, and this is a good argument for showing ownership as its own field instead of leaving people to find it out in a comment section. Noted, and thank you.

    On quality post-2021: that I can't verify, so I won't pretend to.

  • I verified where 600+ "European" brands are actually made — here's what surprised me

  • You're right, and thanks for catching it — I've fixed it rather than argue about it.

    What was happening: browle's own code has no GTM and no analytics cookies (PostHog, EU-hosted, cookieless, no person profiles). But the newsletter signup form was a beehiiv embed sitting on every page, and inside that iframe beehiiv loads googletagmanager.com/gtm.js (container GTM-WJXL7FH) plus a PerimeterX script and Google Fonts, with a __cf_bm cookie on top. So "no tracking" was false for anyone who loaded any page, whether or not they cared about the newsletter. My mistake was treating "we don't add trackers" and "no trackers load" as the same sentence.

    As of today the form only loads when you click the subscribe button. On a normal page view nothing loads from beehiiv or Google at all — the one remaining external request is EU-hosted PostHog, which the privacy page has always described. That page now also names GTM, PerimeterX and the __cf_bm cookie outright instead of leaving them undisclosed: https://browle.com/en/privacy

    If you check again and something still fires that shouldn't, tell me and I'll fix that too.