23 Brands Checked. One Puts the Origin in the Product Data.

What a product page says twice

Every product page speaks two languages. One is for people: images, description, specification list. The other is for machines — a data sheet in the page source that search engines, price comparison services and shopping assistants read. It carries name, item number, price, availability, often the accepted payment methods.

That format also provides a field for the country of origin. It is called countryOfOrigin, it has been part of the standard for years, and it costs one line.

We looked for it at 23 brands. We found it once.

The one exception

Loro Piana carries it. In the product data sheet of the Sergio cashmere jumper, €1,300, sits:

"countryOfOrigin": { "@type": "Country", "name": "Italy" }

It is the only brand in our check where a comparison service could read the origin without understanding the running text.

On the provenance of this finding: the website refuses our requests. The page was checked in a browser session run by this site’s operator on 31 July 2026; we could not open it ourselves. We say so, because otherwise we would be hiding what the statement rests on.

And what the exception shows

In substance Loro Piana says the least an origin statement can say: a country name, “Made in Italy”, with no town, no facility, no production stage.

Natalino names Naples 58 times in its descriptions, Florence eight times, Okayama four — and is invisible to machines. Asket discloses its supply chain across seventeen steps, each with a supplier name — and is invisible too.

How precisely a brand discloses, and whether that disclosure can be queried, therefore have nothing to do with each other. They are two separate decisions, and as a rule nobody makes the second one deliberately.

The Asket case that is not one

At one further brand the search did produce hits: Asket, 81 of them.

Checking again showed something else. The fields sit in Asket’s own data layer — countryOfOrigin with the value “Portugal”, countryOfOriginCode with “PT”, plus a supplierName field reading “Cottonparadise, Lda”. Even the supplier’s name sits there machine-readable.

Just not in the standardised block. Its product entry runs to some 14,000 characters and contains zero origin fields. A comparison service reading the standard finds nothing here either.

An address is not an origin

At Windsor, a full postal address appears under “Manufacturer”: Strellson AG, Sonnenwiesenstrasse 21, Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.

That looks like an origin statement but is not one. The European product safety regulation requires a responsible economic operator to be named with an address — who is liable, not where the sewing happened. The two rarely coincide.

We therefore list Windsor as “nothing stated”. Anyone taking that address for the place of manufacture is reading a liability notice as proof of origin.

What it means in practice

A service reading brands by machine sees the same at Natalino as at SIR of Sweden, which states nothing at all: nothing.

The disclosure exists; it simply cannot be queried. For the brand it means its openness shows up in no automated comparison. For buyers it means any filter by origin comes up empty — not because the data is missing, but because it sits in the wrong place.

What we corrected here

The first version of this page rested on thirteen brands and called the finding universal.

For those thirteen it still holds. As a statement about the industry it went too far, and with Loro Piana the counter-example is on the table. We have widened the count to 23 brands and withdrawn the sentence.

The result is not weaker for it but more precise: not “nobody does it”, but “one of 23 does — and it is the one that says the least”.