What is WhereAreYouMade (WayM)?

WhereAreYouMade (WayM) is (pretending to become for now) a wiki-type website for discovering the origins of consumer goods - manufactured or agricultural. “Origins” includes where products come from on planet earth, the people who make them, and how they are made, the parts or ingredients that go into them, and where those parts and ingredients in turn come from. The result is a hierarchical “Product Tree” (PT) that takes us around the world, showing us the intricate interconnectedness of the things we eat, wear and play with.

The products will be classified based on names and categories defined by the WayM user community. Businesses, artisans, craftsmen, farmers and anyone making something for someone else can officially participate by creating subscription pages and by printing a WayM code on their product which indicates the physical location of the factory or field that the product came from.

The Product Tree of any product is like a puzzle with an unknown number of pieces and levels. This is called the Product Tree Puzzle.

Each manufacturer, supplier, or seller of a consumer product will be able to “fill in the blanks” right down to the raw materials used for each part, ingredient, component or subassembly. The end manufacturer might want to encourage suppliers to participate in the creation of product pages to fill in the blanks in the Product Tree Puzzle. But suppliers could also create parts pages without higher-level buyers participating, and could even create higher-level product pages themselves if they know who their customers are and what products their products go into.

As an example, take a look of the image of that Swiss Army knife I saw in a beautiful ad some time ago. It shows all the little pieces that are inside the knife, tiny screws, blades, springs and who knows what else. If the product tree puzzle for this knife existed, you could search for the knife in the WhereAreYouMade search field, click on the knife and see where it is made, maybe watch a video of how it’s made, and talk to the employees or others who share an interest in that product via the “Prodlog”.

Then you could click on the image of the knife and see the next level assemblies that are inside the knife. For each assembly or part, you could in turn click on it, and then see where that comes from, and talk to the people who make it or just find out things about them. And so on, until you get to the companies that make the metals that are used to make the tiny screws that hold the whole thing together. Maybe you'd find out that the metal of the screws is a mixture of iron, carbon, a little chrome and maybe a dash of manganese, and that they’re bought from suppliers that obtain those elements pre-mixed in the form of recycled steel.

The content created on WhereAreYouMade.com by registered users has to conform to legal restrictions. This will require review, editing and censoring mechanisms. We don’t want industrial secrets, such as formulas for popular products or process details on integrated circuits. We consumers just want to know broad outlines of where and how things are made.

The Product Page Quadrants

When a product is found on the WayM site, the Product Page appears in a quadrant format. At the top left, you have a picture of the product which you can click to see what it’s made up of. On the top right, you see the field or factory where that product came from. On the bottom left, you see a video or additional photos of how the product is made. And on the bottom right, you see what is called the “Prodlog”.

The Prodlog

The Prodlog is the checks and balances system of WhereAreYouMade. It’ll let employees and consumers communicate and exchange information relevant to the associated product. It will be a bit like a blog, but it’ll have archiving and ranking features that’ll make it possible to create a kind of encyclopedic knowledge base of articles that are of potential long-term interest to consumers.

The Prodlog will always be controlled by the community – whether on free product pages or subscription product pages. This assures a balance to the commercial interests of advertisers, marketers, owners, directors, and managers of companies.

Certain details about consumer products are not typically highlighted in product ads. For example, how are the animals slaughtered that go into my salami? That’s not really something most people want to know, but I do. I like eating meat, but I don’t find every type of slaughter I’ve heard about acceptable. When I was a kid, I grew up in a village where animals were slaughtered behind the butcher shop. It was not a mass production and the atmosphere was somber, almost reverent. Anyone could watch how it was done, and if you ate meat or sausage, you knew exactly where it came from.

But I heard an in-depth interview on a radio program a while back where workers from a meat factory explained the conditions under which they worked and the conditions under which the pigs were slaughtered, and it was shocking to me.  If I knew that the producer of my salami bought their meat from that factory, I’d stop buying that brand. It’s kind of strange how I can keep eating meat products at all given how little I know anymore about what goes on behind the scenes.... Old habits die hard, I guess, when you are shielded by ignorance.

Who Pays for WayM in the Long Run?

Product pages will look visually different if they are freely created or paid for. Free product pages will be editable by any registered user. Subscription product pages will be editable only by approved editors and will be paid for. In our demo, you see some product pages with bluish colors that would indicate free pages, while those with orange colors are meant for subscription pages.

We believe that there are enough businesses willing to open up to the world that they’ll pay a subscription fee and a pay-per-click fee to create this kind of “reality advertising”.

The WayM logo   

The WayM logo is derived from the abbreviation of the domain name WhereAreYouMade. The beauty of this abbreviation is that it leads us to the fundamental aspect of the web site – the people and the Way in which the products we consume are Made. A further beauty can be seen in the symmetry of the letters W and M. The angled opening of the top of the W represents the figurative doors from which products (be they raw materials, parts, ingredients or the end products) leave a field or factory while the angled opening of the bottom of the M represents the doors of the next level manufacturer or consumer at which these products arrive. The wavy lines connecting the doors to each other represent the transportation paths that weave across the earth to connect the one with the other.

The Global Marketplace and Alex’s 1001 Questions

Living in Europe gives you a particular appreciation of globalization. There are Italian Parmesanos and Provolones and French Camemberts and Bries and Spanish Manchegos and German Limburgers and Dutch Goudas and Swiss Emmentalers, and you can buy many of these cheeses in any European grocery store.

The number of ingredients used to make cheeses are amazingly limited – milk, salt, and tiny biochemical factories called bacteria (in technical language that’s “starter cultures”). But the end result is truly astounding in terms of the variety of tastes, textures and colors. It sure would be interesting to know where they came from, check into the factory, take a peek at the animals that get milked – cows, goats, sheep – and learn a little bacteriology in the process.

Wow, just looking up data for this paragraph I learned that there are more bacteria in us than the total number of human cells – like 10 times more! Yuk! Just wait when you see microscope pictures of all those cheese culture bacteria you eat! And don’t try to count them yourself – even on the internet, there seems to be no good consensus on if we have about 40 trillion or 100 trillion cells. That would make it about 400 trillion or 1 quadrillion (or about 150,000 times more than people on earth) bacteria in our bodies. This brings up the question of, “What is the ‘truth’?”. And which “truths” are worth knowing?

Not everything is fun and games when learning about the global economy. We consumers are confronted almost daily by media reports of scandalous, or even outright criminal, behavior by various producers or sellers of goods. One hears of beloved family dogs dying from contaminated pet food, of babies dying from melamine adulterated formulas, of an entire factory crumbling under the overload of generators and sewing machines killing over one thousand employees, of thousands of coal miners dying in China every year, of horse meat added to meatballs labeled 100% beef, and a seemingly endless continuum of horrors found in the modern, global economy. The end result is an ever increasing sense of cynicism and distrust amongst consumers and a general deterioration of quality of life.

When I started getting serious about this website, I began asking myself more and more questions. I’ll share a few examples of the 1001 questions that I have had over the past years....

1. Corporate Responsibility

There are a lot of efforts in the world to try and tranquilize our conscience when we go shopping. There are bio and eco products (I’m just learning a little about what that is supposed to mean), Fair Trade initiatives, the Forest Stewardship Council to help us know where paper products come from and how they’re made, CO2 footprint metrics, aerosol sprays free of substances that cause ozone depletion, and many other corporate responsibility efforts. Products often have a lot of labels on them that I don’t understand or that don’t tell me anything interesting or useful.

So how many bad apples are there actually in the basket? And what exactly is a bad apple anyways? For some, a company that keeps closing and opening factories, or buying and selling factories to be able to close, streamline, optimize the manufacturing flow, are bad apples. Others say that a “free market” requires the “free” flow of capital and goods. The 212 cookie factory employees that got laid off in a small city of 7,000 up in the Spanish meseta not only thought of the parent company as a bad apple, some of them even got violently upset and took the factory boss hostage to prevent the destruction of a good part of their local society. For the shareholder who sees revenue for the international company climb from $260 million to $270 million, it may also be a bad apple because the growth was under expectations and the stock price dropped 5% when the “underperforming results” were announced.

Would you stop buying those cookies, even if they were your favorites to make a statement? Or would you just write in the Prodlog of that product, “I love these cookies, but I heard what they did to that small city in northern Spain, and I think that’s not the way to do business. I won’t stop eating those cookies because they’re my favorites, but I’ll only buy half as many for the next year.”

Judging can be tricky. Every one of us has their own unique standards of what they are willing to support with their money and what not. That’s why I believe everyone needs access to as much knowledge as possible to make decisions they can live with.

2. Labels, labels on the Wall....

There’s a veritable explosion of labels and labeling on products these days. Where I live, product packaging often contains info in 20 or more languages. From the self-promotional Facebook, Twitter, and fancy looking QR codes pointing to their own websites, to the most useless and meaningless symbols and comments, it’s often so much, that I can’t read anything anymore because it’s all printed in micro font.

On the printer I recently bought, they tell you that for a mobile device to work, it has to be “wireless enabled”. Isn’t that the point of mobile devices? But OK, the box is big, and they have lots of space to print things.

Or you read that the meatballs contain 100% beef, and then you find out that they were a mix of various meats. (I did stop buying those, because if they can’t guarantee that the meat is beef and not horse, how can they guarantee anything at all about its quality?)

Then there is this orange juice that I started buying about a year or so ago. I used to buy the chilled ones that cost 2-3 times more than this one, and the natural assumption was that the chilled ones were fresher and tastier. So I was totally stumped at how good this “ordinary” room temperature OJ tastes. They tell you on the label it is from fresh oranges, and not concentrate, So why is it that around the rest of the world, the room temperature OJ’s I have tried taste only marginally like OJ, and this one’s tastes so much better? I’d enjoy reading a bit more about their orange fields in southern Spain, or wherever else they may import oranges from, and how they maintain this consistency for such a low price.

In the clothing industry, they’re going nuts with labels (depending on where they sell their products). I hate labels that scratch the back of the neck or any other part of my body for that matter. A recent swim cap I bought was packed with labels telling me such interesting things that its size is “Adult” in the European Union and “One size Adult” in the US. What is a one-sized adult anyways? OK, being 40 lbs. overweight didn’t increase my head size very much.

One label shows me an icon for an RFID. Wow! Does that mean that if I read it into the future WhereAreYouMade website, it’ll tell me something about the workers in Sri Lanka where it was made? No, it just tells me that if I want to steal it, I better cut the RFID out first (if I can figure out in which of the 6 labels it’s hidden). But the price is so ridiculously cheap, I wonder who’d want to steal it in the first place.

And then there’s the part about wash before first use. Heck, I’m going to jump in a swimming pool full of water. What kind of poisons did they use that I have to wash it first if even all that water in the swimming pool won’t reduce the danger to my safety?

On underwear, the labels can be particularly annoying. After all, they’re covering a very sensitive part of our bodies. They finally figured out a way to print the labels on the cloth instead of sewing it into the seam. Why did it take them over a 100 years to figure that out? I could have told them 30 years ago what a pain those labels were. If you tried to rip them out, you’d often rip the seam, and if not, the seam was itself badly stitched right there leaving a bump that sensitive types like myself could still feel.

There are the funny ones, like these labels from a sweater where one of them tells you (but only in English) to keep it away from fire. But how far away do I need to keep it? Is this one of those absurd government regulations in one of the countries where they try to sell the sweaters? So if that label were missing in that country, and I burned the sweater by throwing it into a fire, and a part of me along with it, I could sue the manufacturer for a lot of money?

They finally invented labels that are easy to peel off the products, so when you find a product that doesn’t have them, I get pretty annoyed. Especially if removing the label is almost impossible without scratching up the product.

And my last label story is about a frequent discussion I have with my wife about whether the dog food that specialty stores or vets recommend is really significantly better than the common brands you get in large supermarkets. The prices can vary substantially amongst these different brands. One of our two dogs consistently threw up a vet recommended brand every time he ate it, and we had to stop using it. But my wife really loves dogs, and every time someone tries to sell her one of those overpriced bags, she’s a sucker for it. I’m the skeptical one on this front, and tell her that I don’t believe all that lovely marketing.

The last bag she picked up has all the requisite heartwarming artwork of happy dogs sitting next to fresh Mediterranean vegetables, olive oil, and meat, and even has a nice image of chicken breasts with the comment “20% fresh chicken meat”. I’m fairly sure they’re not adding chicken breasts to the dog food as that’s the most expensive part of chicken, so this kind of marketing already leaves me with a terrible aftertaste.

Then you look at the label and just below “Fresh” in nice green font, you see that you have dehydrated chicken meat as the main ingredient followed by fresh chicken. Fine until you get to the whole thing in German, where they tell you that the bag contains 20% fresh lamb. OK, everyone makes mistakes sometimes. But if you’re a dog food manufacturer that wants to charge a premium over what other big-time players do, and you print international labels (presumably because you have ambitions of selling in those countries someday), shouldn’t someone review the labels carefully before ordering the bags from the manufacturer?

Labeling like this doesn’t give me any confidence. I want to know where that factory is, see pictures, but above all, I want to talk to employees who work there and find out what’s really going on. When I look at the brown pellets, they look, feel and smell (no, I don’t want to taste them myself) almost the same as the Friskies or Pedigree stuff I buy. So what’s the justification for such an extreme price difference? And I’ve always wondered, why are there 8% or more ashes in dog food? I’m sure I can find this out in Google, but I’m going to wait for the first manufacturer to explain this to me when they show me a video of how those dog food pellets are really manufactured someday on WhereAreYouMade.com.

3. Let There Be Light

The last few years, flashlight technology has changed radically. Engineers have learned to squeeze so much light out of semiconductor based light bulbs that you can brightly light up any dark path for a long time on just a couple of AA or AAA batteries. But along with that fantastic revolution in light generation, came a very annoying detail. Why is it that almost every one of those fancy new flashlights I have bought, whether from renowned brands to cheap ones sold next to cash registers, the switches are so bad that you can’t have a reliable on/off state anymore???

The picture here shows two of the many I’ve had the past years where you can get various random states with the switch turned “on”. So nowadays, when I walk along a rocky cliff, I have to hit the flashlight against my hand or a rock so the darn thing will turn on again because the switches have deteriorated in quality so much that they are totally unreliable. Every time I have to stop so I don’t trip on a rock, I let out a small scream of frustration how here seems to be an industry segment that is really pulling the legs of 1 billion consumers. Is there not a single manufacturer out there anymore that can sell me a flashlight with a functional switch???

4. You Are What You Eat

I grew up in a small German village where one could walk through the forests and fields and eat fresh berries for free, and the taste of a fresh wild strawberry is indescribable. But even the ones you bought in stores or that you could pick in the fields yourself for pay were pretty tasty. The lack of taste in most fresh fruits that are sold in stores today is one of the most acute reminders every spring when strawberry season starts that something is going terribly wrong with the modern economy. I can get kilos of strawberries for nickels and dimes, but if they are hard as potatoes and taste like bitter water, what’s the point?

I prefer going to the kinds of stores that let you pick your own fruit, so I can put on the plastic glove and feel the texture of the fruits. But whether peaches, apricots, melons, pineapples and even bananas, there seems to be a slow convergence to identical monotonous tastelessness. Yes, I exaggerate a little bit, but it’s a matter of percentages. If I buy tangerines 10 times during the winter citrus season, but I get truly tasty ones only once, I’m mostly frustrated. Oddly enough, if I go to Germany, the tangerines are better on average, a giant mystery to me since I live in Spain where they grow the tangerines that get exported to Germany. And don’t think the Germans pay more for them. No, they’re often cheaper. But with fruits, I’ve noticed that there is hardly any correlation between price and quality anyways. Would a website like WhereAreYouMade.com have the ability to shed light on this entire industry and help producers trying to bring tastier fruits to market? Otherwise it seems to be economic competition only winnable by shelf-life statistics.

Eggs is another one of those segments in the food industry where I can’t quite make up my mind on what to do. There are labels like bio and eco, and free range and who knows what, but in the end, it’s tough to fork over 3 times more money for a dozen eggs when one doesn’t know how they really do things. I was in a supermarket that had about 8 brands of eggs on offer. Prices ranged from 1 to 4 currency units. I felt completely helpless.

I did an experiment a few weeks ago and bought the 4.30 eggs and also the 1.30 eggs. The 4.30 eggs had some good marketing behind them and even a pretty slick website. The chickens live in a mountain valley and eat a mixture of cereals and whatever bugs they find outside in the fields. The 1.30 eggs are from those cage farms, and there are even codes to identify the farm, but I don’t have the knowledge how to actually contact that farm. Still, it’s obvious that a lot of progress has been made in that industry because the coding is already fairly intricate. The outcome of the experiment was that the 4.30 eggs seemed almost unnaturally orange, while the others were perhaps a tad too light colored when turned into scrambled eggs. Neither my wife nor I could tell the difference in taste. My younger son thought the bio eggs tasted better (without knowing they were). But we all know that color influences our sense of taste, so who knows.

If I could know more details about the eggs available to me for sale, I might choose to pay more for certain types, and if enough of us did that, maybe the price wouldn’t have to be so high. And some details are pretty astounding like when my friend Nicole mentioned to me about chicken shredding. I had no idea what she was referring to, and by coincidence a couple days later, I read in a German online paper that male chickens in egg farms are literally shredded. Not sure I actually want to see that because chicks are kind of cute to look at and hold. But I would like to know what they do with all the millions of shredded chickens. Dog food?

Here, too, the public uproar is large enough in Germany that scientists are working on methods to identify the sex of a chick while it’s not yet hatched. But how did it ever come to this in the first place? While mentioning this story to Miguel, a steel worker I met in my favorite local pub, he told me that there was a large chicken farm where they raised them for meat not far from here (closed now). He told me that there, they had done exactly the opposite – kill the female chickens because the roosters grew to larger sizes. Modern industry is sometimes a very strange place.

5. My Questions Are Not Your Questions

The first time I asked my friend Daren to take a look at the home page of WhereAreYouMade.com, he said, “From the introduction paragraph, I just assume I am not the target audience for your product. I do have concerns about food -- such as ‘has this olive oil ever really seen a natural olive?’ But I really don't care about pretty shirts.”

There is no opening paragraph I could write that will address the “target audience” because the target audience is you. I don’t know what you care about, or if you care at all. If you are reading this, you probably are at least curious as to what we’re trying to do, but I could never guess at the 1001 questions you may have had about the products you consume. I wanted to pick one example, and that example refers to the shirt I bought in California a year and a half ago and that was made in Bangladesh and that reminded me of the Savar clothing factory collapse. It was my way of showing respect to the surviving family members, the maimed, injured, and those that never suffered any industrial disaster but make my clothes.

So Daren cares about olive oil because in the USA they apparently had some scandals about olive oil not being really pure olive oil. Maybe you care about baby food, or diapers, or golf clubs, or dishwasher tabs. The only thing we’re going to try and accomplish is building up the infrastructure of this website to allow others to complete our mission – building bridges between the peoples of the world.

Background Story

If you want to know some of the personal background that motivated Alex to start this project, click this background link.