There have been a few times like this but I ran into it again today. I need to buy a simple custom cork for a project and I just sought a native vendor, pretty sure that I wouldn’t find one.
Lo and behold, I was wrong. I found two Finnish sites selling cork products. But something doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s the amount of products, there’s too many - what would have to be a fairly small producer wouldn’t have that large of a catalogue, I don’t think. I read their About Page and it’s just some fluffy “we’re a family business” bit with photos that just look like random buildings. No place names, no people.
Their contact page points to Poland: Nowosolska 12 60-171 Poznan, Poland
Okay so we have an address but it really doesn’t seem like a manufacturing place, it looks like a warehouse (sorry for Google). Their site doesn’t have any info about where their products are produced etc. though they fluff about “high quality portugese cork”.
It feels like an European front for a Chinese manufacturer.
I had the same experience looking into a cosmetics line from Flying Tiger / Normal stores. I dig into the brand and just find some random address in Denmark that doesn’t seem to have anything like a factory in it. See: https://www.sence-essentials.com/, https://www.brandfix.dk/ or https://www.karium.com/ for a similar thing in UK. And at least for the latter product, I have the handcream that says “made in UK”… but I am very doubtful because I can’t find any information about the manufacturing. Everything on their site is just marketing fluff. Linkedin is a bit better but because their sites are so… insubstantial I don’t feel confident in the Linkedin either. There are no people on their sites though (besides what could just be stock models), maybe at most some name for a “contact us” person. At least when I check for example, Lumene, which is an established finnish cosmetics brand, I can take a look at their page and see pictures of what look like a real store, with real people, and I can see their factory at the street view with brand logos etc.
Am I just being kinda overly critical and paranoid or are others noticing this? Between Shopify sites that pretend to be small artisans just reselling Temu junk and AI generated webpages I’ve become really doubtful of every product that doesn’t have very transparent production process with real names and faces attached to them.
Edit: Also yes btw, doing this type of digging is annoying and time-consuming. I want more rigorous labeling standards.
You are and you aren’t wrong. Corporations have taken bureaucracy and turned it into an incomprehensible maze of lunacy with the sole purpose of confusing everyone about everything.
Yes there are stuff manufactured locally, but they’re contracted by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a global corp to deliver exclusively to the warehouse you find listed. They generally have little to no presence online and so virtually don’t exist, which is why you’re not finding them.
But that warehouse isn’t some goodwill project. It’s a monopoly filled with all the ugliness you expect, price fixing, exploitation of the actual manufacturers, mixing in fake and defective materials, bribing the local government, money laundering etc. that can be discarded without a thought and replaced with another subsidiary at any point.
Protections for the little guy are lacking even in EU in this regard.
Is it stuff made in EU? For the most part.
The part that isn’t however uses wordplay which changes the subject of the sentence. What is made in the EU for those? The packaging. They bring in what is defined as raw product from the outside and dress it up nicely, therefore the resulting product is “Made in EU”.
Of course the origin of the raw product has to be mentioned, and it is, in the small print few people bother to read.
You are right to be wary because there are a lot of shenanigans going on using loopholes in every inventive way possible. However, Chinese companies don’t have exclusive patents to this kind of finagling.
Some might be European fronts for foreign companies, but it is often enough the reverse as having a foreign front to shield local crooks. It can and does happen both ways.
I also have these concerns. It’s really hard for consumers to tell where products come from and who actuslly makes them. We need a lot more supply chain transparency.
I think there’s an EU law requiring some larger companies to explain their suppliers to prevent things like forced labor even outside the EU. But I think it doesn’t nearly go far enough while also not providing an efficient digital path to verify supply chains, thus causing bureaucratic overhead and disadvantaging smaller businesses.
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At least for larger companies you can look them up online and see if they or others have posted when they have manufacturing or where they are headquartered. It’s hard though, most of the time it’s more on vibes than actual information (do they have contact/support in your country, what languages do they support on their website, etc.)
Am I just being kinda overly critical and paranoid or are others noticing this?
Hard to tell without knowing the product and the company. the final product may be assembled here, and some ‘local’ touch added to it, for which some warehouse should be enough, but I would imagine all parts/components are being manufactured somewhere overseas where labor is cheaper.
And it won’t change overnight, not even after our leaders suddenly have realized it may not have been the fucking brightest idea ever to get rid of our production capacities (and worse, to get rid of our skilled workers and our expertise). Those can’t be recreated from scratch by political discourses. It will take a lot of time, will-power and efforts from all of us, and a lot of money. All things it looks like we’re in short supply of (contrary to political discourses, those we have plenty alas nobody want to buy those ;)
You’re describing the exact problem that the US tariffs are (recklessly) attempting to combat.
