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.
That is what I ended up doing, so thanks for the push. The three wrong lines are struck through in the post now, with the correct version right underneath. Nothing deleted, and you get the right info without having to scroll into the comments.
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.
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.
Your experience checks out. Nearly everything Salomon sells, jackets included, is made in Asia. The French factory is real but builds select shoe models only; my entry was too loose about that until this thread, and now says so plainly.
On ownership: Salomon belongs to Amer Sports, originally Finnish, and Amer's largest shareholder since the 2019 buyout is Anta Sports from China (PromKingJosh has the numbers upthread, around 44%, plus a small Tencent stake). So not wholly Chinese-owned, but Chinese-anchored, yes.
The directory deliberately answers one narrow question, where the product is manufactured, and not who owns the brand. Both matter when you decide what to buy; they're just different facts, and blurring them is how "European brand" got so fuzzy in the first place. The same came up with Birkenstock upthread, majority-owned by a US fund since 2021. Showing ownership as its own field is on my list for exactly that reason.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.