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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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 :-)