Are all luxury handbags really made in China?
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If you like to shop for luxury brands, then you may have fallen down a particular TikTok rabbit hole in recent weeks. It's all about Chinese manufacturing, and the videos go something like this.

A friendly but assertive presenter tells you that most designers make their goods in Chinese factories. Then you're taken on a tour of the production line and see workers with what are allegedly luxury handbags and clothes. But the workers stop short of slapping on a luxury brand logo. The presenter says that'll happen in Europe or America and that designers don't want you to know that. Shh.

It's not clear if the recent news of the US and China raising tariffs on each other's imported goods have inspired these videos, but one thing is clear: no consumer wants to feel like they've been duped into spending a lot of money for a made-in-Europe bag that actually hasn't been made in Europe.

So is there any truth to these videos? Is a luxury handbag you buy from a Chinese website the same as one you buy from a luxury department store in Paris? And why do brands make individual items in multiple countries anyway? That's what we're talking about on today's episode. I'm William Lee Adams, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service. ♪

First, let's hear from Jake Horton, a reporter at BBC Verify who's been analyzing these videos. Many of them have since been deleted. Jake, hi. Hi, good to be here. Thanks for coming in. So what are some of the claims that are being made in these videos?

So there's a series of videos and they purport to be from people who claim to work in manufacturing in China. And they're essentially saying that luxury brands, in particular luxury handbags, are almost always made in China and then they're just shipped to Europe. A logo is stuck on it for Louis Vuitton or Gucci or various other brands that are associated in these videos. And then that earns those bags a Made in Europe label. And for so many of these luxury brands, heritage is important. So that's a big sticking point.

How have these designer companies responded to the claims in the videos? So very few of them have directly responded to the claims in the videos. And quite a lot of their public information online doesn't mention manufacturing in China at all, pretty much. For instance, Louis Vuitton, who has come up in some of the videos, they've said on their website that their leather goods are exclusively produced in workshops in Europe and the U.S.,

Gucci have said 95% of its manufacturing is based in Italy. And we did approach these companies to ask for their reply and we didn't hear back. We only heard back from Lululemon, who did tell us that 3% of their final goods were made in China. But they also said that they weren't associated with any of the manufacturers in the videos that were spreading online. And over at BBC Verify, you and your team are all about verifying the truth. Are the claims in these videos correct?

So we spoke to several experts, supply chain experts, copyright law experts, and they said that the claim that just a logo is stuck on a product that's made in China and then it's sold in Europe under the banner of Made in Europe isn't true. But it's not true that no production is done in China at all. So they said it's somewhere in between those two claims. The experts told us that a lot of production will be done in China, but then the final assembly of a product is done in Europe.

So there are EU laws which mandate this. And the EU law says that the last substantial transformation for a product to be labeled as made in Europe has to take place in a European country. But like I said, the guidelines around that are a little bit unclear. So it's not definite what that entails. But all the experts told us it wouldn't just count putting a logo on something as is claimed in some of these videos out of China. Whenever we talk about luxury goods, people talk about cheap versions, fakes, counterfeits.

Are these factories involved in the production of fakes? So it's very hard to say on a case by case basis. We tried to get in contact with the companies that were posting on TikTok. None of them got back to us. But of course, we do know that although some companies do produce and supply some luxury brands, there's also a lot of counterfeit goods which claim to be for big brands, big luxury brands.

And while they may look the same on the surface, if you look online, if you went directly and ordered them, the final product would look similar, but the quality wouldn't quite be the same. So we do know there's a big counterfeit industry. Why is it so hard to trace where luxury items are made? Why is there this lack of transparency?

It's because there's very little law around how much a company has to disclose. And it's not in the company's interest to say that their goods are not made in Europe because there's more, like you said, there's more prestige associated with European goods. And they don't have to disclose where it's made. So a lot of them give very little information about their production outside Europe. Jake Horton, BBC Verify. Thank you so much for explaining that. Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Now, part of why manufacturing has become such a huge discussion is because it was one of the key issues raised during President Donald Trump's presidential campaign, and it's now dictating a lot of policy decisions around trade.

Earlier this year, President Trump introduced tariffs of up to 145% on Chinese goods and a 10% tax on goods from the majority of other countries. He's argued that tariffs will encourage companies to make their products in America, protect jobs, and boost the American economy. Now, we're not getting into that today, but I think it's worth understanding why things like bags, shoes, and clothes are often made in China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam.

Here to tell us more is Blythe Milligan. She is a supply chain expert and the host of the Everything is Logistics podcast. Now, first things first, could you explain why some companies outsource production to countries like China, Cambodia, and Bangladesh?

Sure. So many of these countries started this process years ago, sometimes even decades ago. And for a lot of these companies, what they're looking for is to just offload a lot of their production, their refining, their processes over to emerging countries because there's a low cost of labor. There's also a high expertise of building those crafts and those products. And

And so it's sort of a win-win for a lot of companies to be able to save some money on their production and the refining costs. When people talk about the supply chain, what does that mean? It essentially means, so, well, I'll take a step back because there's, you know, Elon Musk once said that, you know, the factory is the product, but really the supply chain is the product. So a lot of folks will think about, you know, a product that arrives on their

porch. And they don't really put any thought into how this product came to be. So it's not just where you get your products such as the leather, but where the metal tags on those bags are being made.

And it's the manufacturing of that metal, where you're getting that metal from, the refining processes of it. It's also the leather itself. Where are you getting that leather from? How are you processing? How are you dyeing it? How are you stitching it all together? And so bringing these source of the source of the product together.

together and assembling it together, that is essentially your supply chain on the back end of things. Now, the other side of the supply chain is also the transportation of those goods. So you have to assemble the goods, and then you actually have to transport it into a distribution center, a warehouse. And then from there is usually when it's shipped out to the customer using a trucking provider or a last mile provider, sometimes even air freight.

for some of those goods, especially in the United States that are flown over from East Asian countries over to the United States. Oh, wow. Let's take an example. A simple cat toy, like a cat tower, which has rope, it has wood, it has screws, it has fabric. A simple cat tower could have products from all over the world.

Yes, it could sound quite complex because some of those parts or some of the sources of the products are shipped and manufactured in one country. And then they're shipped all the way over, usually via a cargo ship, to another country for another piece of that puzzle. And then the process just repeats itself. And this is done for...

Very large amount of products all across the world where one country tends to control the overwhelming majority of the production of that one piece, that one source of the source. Let's look at handbags, for instance. What would you say are the main steps when you're making a product like that?

So it starts at the intellectual IP level. So there's typically someone in a shop that is designing the look of the bag. They're probably doing market research into that process or what would actually be appealing to someone to want to buy that. And then you're bringing in executive level business.

board members and executives just in general that will give the final okay on if that product can go into production. And then you have procurement. So when procurement comes into play, they're trying to find all of the different sources of what they need to make that bag come to life. And so what they'll typically do is make a few test versions of the bag.

They'll bring in samples from different tanneries, different leather makers, and they'll find out which one is going to be the perfect fit for that bag itself. And then that way they have a few of those sample bags that can then go out and be tested. And then after they pass through sort of

quality assurance and testing is when the large scale production starts to ramp up. And then that's when it's sort of a quote unquote mass produced for a lot of, you know, the viral videos that you've seen, they talk about the bare bones cost of that. But what they kind

leave out in those videos is the intellectual property that went into designing that bag, the market research that we just talked about. All of these different components add to the pricing. Plus, if you're limiting the supply of the bag, sometimes the demand goes up. And sometimes when the demand goes up, the price also goes up. Many of these videos say that the cost of the products would be a fraction of what they are if they were bought directly from the supplier. Is that correct?

There's a hint of truth there. Now, what the pricing doesn't take into effect is that somebody spent a lot of time coming up with the design of that bag. Somebody spent a lot of time finding out different suppliers all over the world who can source the product to make that bag. And then there's the marketing that goes into it. They're just normal business operational costs.

that go into making that bag. So yes, well, that pricing of the materials is much cheaper than what you would buy typically or what you see when that product has hit the store. But there's a lot of the other processes that have to be factored in as well, including the transportation costs, depending on where you get your goods. Bringing this to now, to the current moment, we have what many have described as a brewing trade war.

How is that impacting the supply chain right now? Oh, it's definitely impacting it quite a bit because I think the world is sort of waking up and credit to a lot of these viral videos that have been spreading like wildfire. The world is kind of waking up and sort of lifting the veil on which countries control the overwhelming majority of where our products come from, not just where they come from, where they're sourced, but where they're processed, where they're refined.

You know, there's a very much a global security debate as well, sort of a national security debate for many different countries. But you could also make the argument that global trade is a benefit to humanity and that it's a benefit to society that we keep these trade relations partners intact, because if you trade with a country, you're less likely to go to war with that country.

And so what we're seeing right now is not just a reshaping of the global supply chain, but for really the first time in human civilization, we're seeing the global supply chain debate happen in real time in a digital ecosystem. And this is the first time we're able to witness how these trade lanes and these new relationships are established.

There is a lot going on. Everything is logistics. Blythe Milligan, host of Everything is Logistics. Thank you so much for explaining that. Thank you so much for having me. That's all for today. Thanks for listening to another episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm William Lee Adams. We'll see you again soon.