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Buy EuropeanOver the last weeks I went through 600+ brands that get recommended as "European alternatives" and tried to verify where their products are actually made — factory pages, press visits, certifications. Some things genuinely surprised me:
1. Birkenstock really is made in Germany — over 95%. Their largest production site is in Görlitz, Saxony, and they're expanding it. (source)
2. Every single Nespresso capsule sold worldwide is made in Switzerland. All of them — roasted, ground and sealed in one of three Swiss factories. (source)
3. The Norwegian outdoor brands mostly don't produce in Norway — but they built their own factories in the Baltics. Norrøna runs its own factory in Lithuania, Devold makes over 90% of its wool clothing at its Lithuanian plant, and Aclima knits its merino in Estonia. Still EU, still their own factories — but not what the marketing photos imply. (Norrøna, Devold, Aclima)
4. About 85% of Beyerdynamic headphones are still handmade in Heilbronn, Germany. In an industry that moved to Asia decades ago. (source)
5. Salomon opened a fully automated sneaker factory in the French Alps to build shoes 100% in France. Automation is what makes European sneaker production viable again. (source)
6. The canvas sneakers you'd guess are the most "outsourced" product are the opposite: Novesta has run the same Slovak factory since 1939. (source)
The pattern I keep seeing: "European brand" and "made in Europe" are completely different claims. The ones that really produce here are usually loud about the specific factory — the vague ones ("designed in…", "European quality") usually aren't.
And the flip side, which felt just as important: some famous "European" names didn't hold up. The SIGG bottle is no longer made in Switzerland; the Berkel slicer — an Italian icon — is now built in India under a "design made in Italy" line; Teufel is designed in Berlin but produced in China. I put those on a public "not listed" page with the reason for each, because quietly leaving them out felt dishonest.
Disclosure: this is my own project — I put all 628 verified brands with their sources into a free directory, browle.com, EN/DE/FR, no ads, no tracking. The "not listed" page is there too. Corrections very welcome — the evidence link is on every entry.
Will you continue to add more brands and regularly check where they are made? Maybe you can add a field for suggestions of new brands?
Ok, but fuck nestle.
Also most salomons are made here in vietnam. Weirdly they're even more expensive and don't come with a 2 year warranty so I have absolutely no idea who is buying their stuff in Vietnam.
I have bought many jackets and shoes from Salomon, but it has never been made in Europe. And I saw a while ago that they are owned by a Chinese company.
Sounds like Salomon are playing a trick where they imply 100% of all their shoes are made in France, but really it's only 100% of the shoe you're looking at that is.
All this makes me wonder if maybe I should establish a store that only sells European-made/European-owned products... that way, the visitor needs not figure it all out.
Two corrections, both from this thread.
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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.
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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.
Leaving the original text standing rather than quietly rewriting it.
Maybe cross it out and add the correct information afterward? That way the original can be seen, but if someone doesn't scroll down to the comments, they still get correct info.
Bookmarked, thanks.
Espresso capsules may be made in Switzerland, but Nestlé is one of the more ethically problematic corporations, responsible for unethical baby-milk promotion in the developing world, aggressive water privatisation and other predatory practices. If it was a choice between them and a random American company, I’d choose the latter.
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".
Nestle CEO on water:
https://youtu.be/mTnJTyeAUA8
I don’t know about all of them, but of the ones I’m familiar with, Birkenstock and Beyerdynamic, neither is really European anymore. Birkenstock sold a majority stake to L Catterton in 2021. It's a US American private equity firm. Beyerdynamic was sold to Cosonic in 2025, a Chinese company.
From what I've heard Birkenstocks have gone down in quality massively since then even if they're mostly still produced in Germany. I don't know how Beyerdynamics has fared since.
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.
Salomon Group is also owned by Finnish Amer sports, which in turn is 44% owned by Chinese Anta Sports and 4.5% by Tencent.
claude cream will be the next twitter blue of the web and im already sick of looking at it.
also please dont say there is "no tracking" if you are injecting google tag manager :/
good luck with the project though :)
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.
There's a site that just came to my attention, worseonpurpose.com, that might appreciate this information.
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.
That site blocks users on VPNs.
Not PIA, as that's what I use.
Fun fact, because of Nespresso, Switzerland is the biggest producer of coffee worldwide.
Barely any coffee is roasted where it is grown, so although it sure is a fun fact it's worth mentioning countries like Brasil or Ethiopia are very far from coming second or third.
Arcos knifes are still supposedly made in Spain.
When I was buying a SIGG bottle the filter on the page let me search for EU made bottles. At least some models are still supposedly made in Germany Switzerland.
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.
Arcos knives, which are excellent, and great value, ARE made in Albacete, Spain. 10 year warranty, BTW. Not life, but not shabby.
Hell yeah, thanks for the research!
On electronics, any recommendations? I made a list here...
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.
I mostly listed whatever is owned, established in, or manufactured in Europe.
Thank you - that sounds like a lot of ground work that most people don't know how to even start, but can benefit from.
Good work. I will check it during the weekend.
Do you take suggested additions? I like Fjallraven stuff, but they don’t manufacture in Sweden, sadly.
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.
Fjällräven is a lifestyle fashion company nowadays unless you go for the top shelf stuff.
Expand on this? You don’t like their winter gear?
Not much to expand on and it's not any sort of shocking surprise either.
They still have a premium segment that is among the best, but what used to be affordable great quality outdoors gear is nowadays overpriced urban fashion lifestyle branding for clothes and bags and stuff that are made for looks rather than be in the wild.
An unsurprising and sadly common progression when the founder leaves the business to the kids and family that aren't emotionally invested but want to cash in enough for everyone that holds a share of the family business.
That’s the info I was looking for. I still thought they made quality stuff, but I never found them to be affordable. I didn’t know all that about the founder and the kids and so on. That’s unfortunate ☹️.
Their quality gear for enthusiasts is still great, but the reason they are so big and common and known in Sweden is because they were a great bang for the buck in the family price range. That's the money maker where they cut all the corners now when they are an international lifestyle fashion brand.
It's happened with numerous outdoors brands the last ten-twenty years that they shifted ownership and target demographic and let go of what made their reputation in the first place.
Then again, arguably it's the evolutionary nature of commerce and capitalism that good things become what they set out to challenge and new small startups take their place.
Great work, OP! 👏 You have also now made me even more happy about wearing Birkenstock sandals this summer. 😊
https://postimg.cc/QHvYtzy6
As for footwear in general, there seem to be some decenr brands in Portugal and Spain. Maybe you have them covered on the list as well. 😊
Both are in there — 11 Portuguese and 11 Spanish entries at the moment, and footwear is where they're strongest, which matches what you'd expect. Portugal in particular is where a lot of the shoes sold under other countries' brands actually get made.
https://browle.com/en/made-in/portugal · https://browle.com/en/made-in/spain
p.s.: glad to make you even more happy wearing Birkenstock sandals 😀
Please ditch the clickbait title, it's quite annoying.
Btw yea, those labels like IKEA's "designed in Sweden" are openly racist, who tf cares where something was designed, don't try to Europe-wash your outsourced production...
I think it is important where the items are designed, but the manufacturing is also important. I will still avoid the Chinese cars that will be manufactured in Europe because of the design and ownership.
This — is — AI — slop.
It's not just the em-dashes; the whole post reads like Claude-generated slop. Sorry about the downvotes.
https://feddit.uk/comment/26477759 - this comment by the OP is just too on the nose.
Two corrections, both from this thread.
Leaving the original text standing rather than quietly rewriting it.
Yep, that's how normal people talk. Native speakers especially. lmfao.
I have been using that construct since 1972.
Is it though? Some people, myself included, actually use emdashes, though I'm usually just lazy and use a hyphen instead.
Or is something beyond the emdashes tipping you off?
Sane people use n-dashes. Fight me.
I agree, m-dashes are too long, but afaik in US-English they are the norm (but not with spaces around it, which imho makes it even worse).
I would say – interjecting like this – flows much better than—interjecting like this—in the middle of text.
While some people would insist on a strict difference in the usage between en and em dash, like so many things the lines have become blurred.
Though to some this is "incorrect" usage, I like the space-endash-space visually as a replacement for (bracketed) text, especially when dealing with a longer "aside" within a larger block of text.
As however those exact same people would almost certainly tell me that "language evolves" and to stop being a "prescriptivist" when insisting that you can't just use words incorrectly and insist that the reader keep up with your new meaning, they can get bent.
I like the way it looks, and it reads well for the overwhelming majority of people.
The en dash is the neglected middle child of the dash family. It likely appreciates being noticed at all.
When being lazy, an em dash should be replaced with two hyphens.
But that's two keystrokes when one somewhat suffices. One is lazier than two!
True, but two hyphens is at least the correct way to do it when using a typewriter or limited character set. Using only one hyphen goes past lazy all the way to wrong.
It has a clickbait title, but they might have used an LLM to clean up text
