I don’t know about all of them, but of the ones I’m familiar with, Birkenstock and Beyerdynamic, neither is really European anymore. Birkenstock sold a majority stake to L Catterton in 2021. It’s a US American private equity firm. Beyerdynamic was sold to Cosonic in 2025, a Chinese company.

From what I’ve heard Birkenstocks have gone down in quality massively since then even if they’re mostly still produced in Germany. I don’t know how Beyerdynamics has fared since.

Despite the negative tone regarding the European side of the initiative in the first half of the video, everything seems to be running smoothly. That not everything would go perfectly from start to finish was to be expected and Ross said as much too. Him and everyone involved in making this happen are doing a great job and I have full trust in them.

It is telling though that the industry has to resort to nothing but lies and disinformation to “make their case.” They have no worthy argument against it and they know it. Hopefully all of those who make the decisions in the end of the day also know that.

Great news! It’s good to see that they actually seem to care about people’s opinions once in a while.

So, does anyone want to play a game of over/under on how long it will take before it’s proposed again? I’m guessing under three months.

I can recommend Hetzner Storage Boxes. The company is located in Germany, but you can choose server locations in Germany and in Finland. You can set it up with Rclone’s Crypt feature to encrypt all your files.