Over 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) (Scope correction in the EDIT below.)
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 and since this thread: no third-party code on a normal page view. The “not listed” page is there too. Corrections very welcome — the evidence link is on every entry.
EDIT (26 July): I wrote in the correction comment that I’d leave the original text standing. With a third correction now in, that stops being honesty and starts being a post that’s wrong in three places, so the corrections are in the body itself: wrong lines struck through, nothing deleted.
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“No tracking” was wrong. The site’s own code never had trackers, but the newsletter form was a beehiiv embed that loaded Google Tag Manager and other third-party scripts inside its iframe on every page. Since 25 July the form loads only if you click it; a normal page view runs no third-party code. Details in the comment linked above.
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The SIGG line was wrong. They still run their own factory in Frauenfeld and mark the Swiss-made bottles with a red Swiss cross; other lines come from outside suppliers. “Check for the cross”, not “no longer made in Switzerland”.
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Salomon needed scoping. The French factory is real, but it builds select models; most of the range is still made in Asia. The directory entry now says so plainly.
All three came from commenters here. The count in the disclosure was 628 when I posted; it’s 631 today, and three of those are tips from this thread.
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.