Shoes that look better with age...

[ATWM]

3 hours ago, Broark said:

but this seems to firmly substantiate them.

I disagree. Perhaps it’s the old journalist in me, but some skepticism is always warranted when an incomplete online story catches fire.

A letter from the FTC is obviously concerning, but there is some grey area in the law that’s defined, and it’s quite possible that they’ve been doing the same thing for quite awhile and it was okay under a previous administration, and now it isn’t. These laws written vaguely as such leave a lot of discretion for enforcement.

This isn’t to say they don’t need to comply, and that they should absolutely be transparent about their sourcing - I’m just saying that suspicion ≠ is not confirmation, and I feel like - at least given from what I know in the letter - they should at be given the benefit of the doubt for the period that that the FTC gives them to comply (whatever that actually means in practice). 

Anyways, it sucks either way, but there’s too much unknown in there at this point. What if, for example, the leather is American, the sole is American, the sole stitching is American, but the stitching on the upper is Dominican. It’s mostly USA, right? I wouldn’t label it MiUSA myself, but the way the law is written arguably leaves room for that, or did. And I do completely agree that it’s not hard to be transparent, and they should if they are not.

That said, this can all get pretty complicated because almost everything now is somehow a global product. Even jeans have cotton from one country and thread from potentially somewhere else and hardware from who knows with metal from who knows. I digress - I’m not defending OSB. I just want to see a little more information first. 

[indigoeagle]

I think, there a lots of videos, articles and discussions on luxury goods, that state that they were "made in Italy" or "Swiss made".

Apparently sometimes whole suits were made abroad except for the buttons, which were then finished in Italy and that was still enough to call them "made in Italy".
But what if the act of attaching the buttons in Italy is more expensive than sewing the suit somewhere else, so that part would be more than 50% of the cost of manufacturing?

Edited 7 hours ago by indigoeagle