“Ethically problematic” is an understatement

Nestle CEO on water:

https://youtu.be/mTnJTyeAUA8

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".

Salomon Group is also owned by Finnish Amer sports, which in turn is 44% owned by Chinese Anta Sports and 4.5% by Tencent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fjällräven is a lifestyle fashion company nowadays unless you go for the top shelf stuff.

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.

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 😀

Arcos knives, which are excellent, and great value, ARE made in Albacete, Spain. 10 year warranty, BTW. Not life, but not shabby.

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 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.

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.

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.