browle

Last week someone here posted a list of welted shoe and Shetland knitwear makers, partly to make the point that "just one line made in UK" is a common dodge. I said I would check them. Here is what came back.

Ten new names, nine listed, one rejected.

Knitwear, which turned out to be the actual gap

Shoes were already well covered. Knitwear was not, and the comment made that obvious.

Jamieson's of Shetland runs the only commercial wool mill on the islands, at Sandness. Fleece is graded, scoured, dyed and spun there, and the knitting happens on the islands too.

Harley of Scotland has been on the same plot in Queen Street, Peterhead since 1929. It was a herring yard before they bought it.

Bosie is North East Scotland, a family in the trade since 1929, producing in Scotland.

Howlin' is the interesting one. Antwerp label, but the knitwear has been made in Scotland since 1981. Their lighter jersey and towelling pieces name no country, so that entry carries a partial badge instead of a full one.

William Lockie was already on the list before the thread, for what it is worth.

Shoes

Goral moved the family workshop from Poland to Sheffield in 2005 and makes every pair there start to finish.

Berwick makes in Almansa. All 48 products on their own site say so.

Vass works out of a Budapest workshop, handmade only.

J.M. Weston marks 342 of its 783 products "Fabriqué en France à Limoges". All 24 derbies carry it and not one of the 67 shoe trees does, so that one is partial too.

Baracuta was exactly the case described in the comment. Their own product copy says the G9 Harrington has been designed and made in the UK since 1937. Nothing else in the range says anything, and the bags and belts are made in Italy.

Gola did not make it

Their about page is all heritage. A small factory in 1905, plimsolls on 1970s pitches, "an iconic British brand". Nowhere does it say where the shoes are made today. That describes a design lineage, not a factory, so Gola went onto the not listed page with the reason written out.

On New Balance, which came up in the same comment

The Flimby factory is real and the Made in UK line is genuine. It still stays off, because the directory lists European brands and New Balance is American. That is a scope decision rather than an evidence one, and it seemed more honest to say so than to quietly drop it.

Two things that nearly went wrong

goral.co.uk is a parked domain with a for sale banner on it. The real site is goral-shoes.co.uk. Had I only tried the obvious address I would have written off a working Sheffield manufacturer as untraceable.

The Vass site footer reads "Made in Budapest by WordPress Expert". That is the web developer. The actual evidence sits on their about page. A "made in" in a footer usually belongs to the agency, not the product.

Ten leads, nine held up. That is a better hit rate than my own research usually manages, so if you know a knitter or shoemaker I have missed, the same offer stands.

Disclaimer: browle.com is mine. None of the ten brands above is monetised, though 7 of the 721 entries do carry an affiliate link, so it is a project that can earn money rather than a pure hobby. No ads and no third party code on a normal page view.

Last week I posted here about verifying where 600+ "European" brands are actually made. Three of you corrected me: the SIGG line, the Salomon scope and the tracking claim. All three are fixed in that post and in the directory.

Since then I worked through British heritage names. The pattern is sharper than anything I found on the continent. These brands do manufacture in Britain, and the phrase still tells you almost nothing.

Burberry. The Heritage Trench and Car Coats have been made at the Castleford site in Yorkshire for over 50 years, from gabardine woven at Burberry's own mill in Keighley. That is the British part. The rest of the range is made elsewhere.

Barbour. The Bedale and Beaufort wax jackets are still made by hand in Simonside, South Shields. That is two jackets. The same building re-waxes and repairs the ones customers send back, which I would argue counts for more than most heritage marketing.

Mulberry. The company says it makes "around 50% of our Icons" at its two Somerset factories, which makes it the largest luxury leather manufacturer in the UK. Half, of the icon range.

Drake's. Every tie is handmade in their own east London workshop. Shirts and knitwear come from other makers.

Turnbull & Asser. Shirts, ready to wear and bespoke, from their own factory on the edge of Gloucestershire. One line from the factory stuck with me: they have machinists, not machine operatives, and each one can make a whole shirt.

Five famous British names, and in every case the honest answer is a product line, not a brand. The label on the individual piece is the only thing that actually tells you.

One that did not make it: Whitehouse Cox, the Walsall leather workshop. I went to verify them and the domain no longer resolves. Founded 1875, gone at some point recently, and I cannot even find an announcement.

Same project as last time. The five above are in the directory with the scope written on each entry and the source linked. Corrections welcome, the last three came from this thread.

Disclaimer: browle.com is mine. None of the five brands above is monetised, though 7 of the 671 entries do carry an affiliate link, so it is a project that can earn money rather than a pure hobby. No ads and no third party code on a normal page view, as discussed in the last thread.

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.

1. "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.

2. 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".

3. 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.