OK, thanks for your feedback. And I am not taking it as a personal attack - no worries. I am writing this and the reply before, completely on my own - without any help of LLM or other tools :-) It may be the English that I am used to apply from my normal work in business! Have a good one!
Yes, indeed. I received similar feedback from others as well. I believe you are fully correct. I actually used LLM to review my comments/posts. I got your point and fully agree with you. I will make sure, that in moving forward I will only use LLM to a strict minimum and keep my own personal language (as non-English-native speaker ;-)). Thank you very much for this, trolske!
not a bad idea :-)
Thanks, glad it is useful. Honestly there is no story. It just sounded decent to me and the domain was free. The one deliberate part was that it had to mean nothing in particular. The site runs in English, German and French, so an obvious name like buyeu or madeineurope would have read fine to English speakers and clumsy to everyone else. A word that means nothing is at least equally neutral in all three.
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.
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.
Two corrections, both from this thread.
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.
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 😀
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.
Hey huppakee. Thanks for your feedback. I like your suggestion about using llm to practice my English skills. I will most probably try to do so. I believe it could be quite more efficient rather than using those common apps like babble or dualingo, because it the LLM can be told to be super-specific to me! As to browle.com: yes, I have been using LLM quite a lot to do the research - as you can see I am now at more than 900 brands that were analysed. I could not have done this research without LLM actually. But, I set the rules, the boundaries- therefore it acts on my behalf. My personal motivation on browle is actually to make us all more aware about our decisions when we buy something. My personal opinion: Europe is a great place to live and to work. We should be proud about what we are, what we do and what we stand for. When I break a small part of this down to “my personal buy behaviour” I try as much as possible to favour EU made products.