UK
FR
DESeptember 7, 2026
Pick up almost any manufactured object and somewhere on it, or on its box, is a phrase about where it came from. The phrases look interchangeable. They are not, and the differences are where the interesting information hides.
“Made in”
This is the strongest-sounding claim and the most regulated, but the rules are less demanding than most people assume. For customs purposes, a product’s country of origin is generally the place where it was wholly obtained or, for things made from parts sourced in several countries, where it underwent its last substantial transformation. “Substantial” is a term of art. It can mean a great deal of work, or it can mean the step that turned a set of components into a finished product. A garment sewn in one country from fabric woven in another is usually “made in” the first. A device assembled in one country from a circuit board manufactured in another may be “made in” either, depending on what counts as the transforming step.
So “Made in Europe” tells you that the last significant stage happened in Europe. It does not tell you where the materials came from, how much of the value was added there, or whether the same product is also made elsewhere for other markets.
“Assembled in”
This phrase is more honest, and companies tend to use it when they know that “made in” would not survive scrutiny. It says that parts, wherever they were produced, were put together here. Assembly can be skilled and substantial, or it can be a matter of fitting a plug and applying a label. The word alone does not tell you which. A company that says “assembled in” rather than “made in” is, at least, telling you something true, and usually telling you to look further.
“Designed in”
This tells you nothing about where the object was made, and is generally used precisely because the answer is somewhere else. Design is real work and it matters, but a product designed in one place and manufactured in another is a product manufactured in another. Treat “designed in” as a statement about the company’s offices, not its factories.
Why Eurava does not label products
Given all this, you might expect a directory like ours to sort every item by its origin label. We decided early not to, and the reason is that we could not do it honestly.
The label on a product is set by the company. We see products through data feeds that rarely carry origin at all, and where they do, we cannot check it against the item, since we never touch the item. A company can make the same model in two factories on different continents and ship whichever is nearer. A per-product badge from us would be either a copy of the company’s own claim, dressed up to look like our verification, or a guess.
What we can assess is the company. Does it make everything in Europe, some things, or nothing? That is a question with public evidence: factory locations, annual reports, the company’s own account of itself. So our production badge is a statement about the maker, and the product page says exactly that: “a company produces partly in Europe”. If the badge is Partial, the item in front of you may be from the European factory or may not, and the company’s product page is where to look. If it is Full, you have a good answer. If there is no badge, we have not checked, and we would rather you knew that than trusted a label we had not read.