Category Archives: Recreation

Where's your high-end sportswear made?

Sierra Trading Post mailed me their End-of-Winter 2011 catalog, which consists mostly of mid- to high-end sportswear products, but also things like snow skis, flashlights, and binoculars. STP sells closeouts, overstock, seconds, and items with cosmetic blemishes or irregularities. I spent an hour of relaxation time enumerating the various product brands and their places of manufacture. In short, most brands in the STP catalog manufacture in China.

Some of the brand names are misleading. For instance, Calida of Switzerland has products made in Portugal, Hungary, and China, but not Switzerland (at least not in the STP catalog)!. Here is a graphic illustrating the marginal product counts for each place of manufacture.

The raw product counts, by brand and place of manufacture are available in CSV, compressed R data file, and HTML:

SierraTP-Inventory-LateWinter2011.csv
SierraTP-Inventory-LateWinter2011.rda
SierraTP-Inventory-LateWinter2011.html