It takes a lot to make your average Kiwi angry - testing atomic bombs in their backyard is one and blowing up Greenpeace vessels in Auckland Harbour is another. Trying to pretend that goods made in China are "Kiwi-Made" is another. But this is exactly what Icebreaker are doing when they continue to try to claim they should still be allowed to use the "Kiwi-Made" label.

Many, if not most Kiwi's feel that if people buy something with a Kiwi tag, then find out it's made in China, they're going to feel conned. Many people who have bought Icebreaker in recent years have felt exactly this when despite all the wonderful pictures of New Zealand that cover Icebreaker's advertising and their claims to be clean and green, they discover the "made in China" labels on the inside of their garments.

What most people are unaware of is that Icebreaker never actually "make" anything. They contract out their brand for production, originally to a number of New Zealand companies, then pulled out all production to China, leaving many NZ companies in difficulty and a lot of people out of work. Icebreaker is not therefore "Kiwi-Made" but "China-Made". Despite this, Icebreaker, through expensive advertising and their use of New Zealand web addresses and domain names, are still trying to give the image of being New Zealand-made. They push clean green New Zealand-made credentials when they don't have any!

Our own wool industry contacts in New Zealand even say that whilst Icebreaker may indeed use some New Zealand merino, when they do the maths, they find it hard to believe that all Icebreaker's merino fleece comes from New Zealand. They say that a careful reading of the Icebreaker website reveals an awful lot of caveats suggesting to them that Icebreaker are also using merino from Australia and China. Whether this is true or not, we couldn't possibly comment!

Nothing, "forced" Icebreaker and the other companies out of New Zealand, as is claimed by Jeremy Moon and others. We have it on authority from several of the companies that used to make Icebreaker garments, that they offered to match the Chinese prices but were turned down. Nor is the claim made by Jeremy Moon that New Zealand didn't have enough capacity, seen as a valid excuse for moving all production away from New Zealand. Nor could Icebreaker say their move to China was in the interests of product quality. Icebreaker always had the option of actually investing in plant and people and developing production itself, rather than doing what it has always done, and contract out. As investigative journalist Barbara Burstyn says

Icebreaker is manufactured in a country that quashes all dissent, that controls information, that jails environmentalists, that hides their environmental mess, that is teetering on the very brink of catastrophe that will impact unimaginably on the entire planet. This is not the 'relationship with nature' that Icebreaker proclaims to be so proud of.

Our own clothing manufacturers are all resolutely New Zealand based. The owners and managing directors of these companies have all invested their own money and time in both plant and people, providing important jobs that support families. How many families do the companies that have moved production away from New Zealand support - in New Zealand that is? The growers who produce the fleece would have a ready market anyway. The designers - how many of these are actually employed?

The fact is that it is the manufacturing process that employs the greatest number of people. Take production away and a lot of people are out of work. When there is no meaningful work that brings in decent wages, society suffers. Any country that loses its manufacturing base loses its experience, expertise, and potential for self-sufficiency. In our opinon, and that of our New Zealand suppliers, this can never be a good thing. We hope you feel the same and support the "Kiwi-Made" campaign by buying merino gear that is really and truly "Kiwi-Made".

It is also wrong to assume that just because something is made from New Zealand merino, that it is made in New Zealand. The US company Smartwool produces a lot of gear using New Zealand merino, but it's production is based in Fiji and China as well as the US. You can't even trust country of origin labels either. A label may say "made in Portugal" or "made in Italy" but when a colleague of ours returned from a textile trade fair in China earlier this year he told us he came across more than one Chinese company who said that they put any country of origin label in garments that the customer wanted! Furthermore, many countries operate a system of "origin" that allows products to carry a "made in" label when it may not be made in that country at all.

New Zealand law states that to be genuinely "New Zealand-made" New Zealand must be the place of origin of the goods or services in accordance with sections 9 and 13(j) of the [2]Fair Trading Act 1986. “A place of origin can be defined as the country or region where the product was created in its final form from its raw materials or constituent parts. In other words, it is the country or region where the product's 'essential quality' was created. It is not necessarily the place where the most money was spent on a product - and it is not the place where only final assembly or packaging was done”. By this criterion, Icebreaker, Swanndri, MacPac etc., are definitely NOT New Zealand-made and should stop trying to con the customer that they are by misleading use of images of New Zealand, posting and packing from New Zealand, and websites with NZ domains.

So, if the company you're buying from won't tell you exactly (i.e. the physical address of the factory) where their gear is made, ask yourself what they're trying to hide.

Only membership of the "Buy New Zealand Made" campaign is your guarantee that products are truly made in New Zealand. Both we as retailers, and our manufacturing company Soma-President are members of the New Zealand made Campaign, as are Weft Knitting Ltd., who supply us with their Possum Merino accessories. This is your guarantee that our products are truly New Zealand-made. Check out our Eco-News page to read about the environmental problems being created in China by unregulated industries. Below is a pic sent to us showing Shanghai, the main textile center in China. Looks a lot different to the pics Icebreaker use in their advertising!

Chris in New Zealand, who sent us the pic, says

On the same site I found this pic they link to Readers Digest article showing that Shanghai is the second most polluted city in the world. Was this the criteria Jeremy Moon used for his "global search for world class technology and capacity"? I don't think so, and neither do the Kiwis who lost their jobs as a result. Moon shifted his production to China is because it's cheap.