I’ve always wanted to publish a guide.
A real guide, on paper. In the tradition of Baedeker, Michelin, those objects you leaf through, annotate, slip into a coat pocket (and which I have the questionable taste of collecting). A beautiful object in itself, listing the brands worth knowing: the ones whose products last, whose story holds up, whose prices bear some relation to what you’re actually buying.
The paper guide is a dream of mine. The web is the laboratory. A fast testing ground where you build, correct, expand before committing anything to ink. The notes piled up, the spreadsheet grew, and the need has never been more urgent.
The noise
Search “best leather boots” on Google. You’ll find page after page of “top 10” lists. Click through: every link leads to Amazon. Search for the same product on AliExpress: three times cheaper, sometimes identical down to the pixel.
The “buying guide” was nothing but an affiliate catalogue. The author never touched a single pair of those boots.
It’s everywhere. “Buying guides” that are commission storefronts, customer reviews bought by the pound, influencers who discover their passion for a particular knife the day the wire transfer clears. The same product, the same rewritten text, the same affiliate link…
…ad infinitum.
Nobody trusts anything anymore. And when you stop trusting, you buy too much, buy the wrong thing, regret it, throw it away, start over.
What we lost
Thirty years ago, you brought back jeans from New York. You crossed Paris for a cheesemonger, a cobbler, a shop that sold something you couldn’t find anywhere else. Every city had its addresses, its specialities. Travelling also meant bringing back something unique.
Today, Tokyo, Paris, New York, Dubai: same brands, same windows, same bags.
Queues three kilometres long outside shops selling products that are admittedly well made (though not always…), but at prices that bear no relation to what you’re buying. Fake luxury for the masses. And next door, the same fast fashion chains in every city on earth. Same jumpers, same cuts, same polyester.
The levelling
Everyone wears the same uniform thinking they’re in fashion. Brands orchestrate their scarcity to sell clothes made in haste on the other side of the world at gold prices. Their customers believe they’re at the pinnacle of style when they’re carbon copies of the same customer in Soho, Chelsea or Omotesando. Same bag, same jumper, same illusion.
Men are no different. It’s even worse, because they think they’re immune.
They buy shoes from a century-old English house without knowing a luxury conglomerate bought it and replaced the leather with plastic. Plastic, at the same price. Or higher.
Meanwhile, the Spanish workshop that makes shoes for dozens of brands sells the same pair under its own name, half the price, in real leather.
They buy plastic glasses at €399.99 without knowing the frames come from the same factory as every other pair and cost €5 to manufacture, packaging and shipping included. The rest is margin, marketing and a logo.
It’s become the cult of the logo. Polo shirts plastered with inscriptions about a Saint-Tropez marina that never existed, a fictional yacht club, a heritage invented from scratch. Those who wear them think they’re entering a world. They’re entering a mould.
Like that man dressed head to toe in Ferrari (cap, polo, belt, loafers) who climbed into his Citroën BX, and everyone laughed at.
The logo never made the driver.
What remains
We replaced singularity with conformity, and craftsmanship with marketing. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s an observation.
Behind all that noise, there are people who keep doing things well. Workshops that make, that make in silence, remarkable work.
An Opinel knife is a wooden handle, a steel blade, a rotating ferrule. Nothing more. It costs twelve euros and lasts a lifetime. The company has been in the same Savoyard valley since 1890. No creative director, no streetwear collab, no pop-up in Seoul. Just a knife, well made.
Paraboot manufactures its soles in its own factories. Staub casts its cocottes in Alsace. J.M. Weston has its own tannery. Le Chameau moulds its boots by hand in Pont-d’Ouilly.
Opinel sells millions of knives a year. Doing well and lasting are not incompatible.
Why a guide
Because these brands are hard to find. Not physically, they have shops, websites, retailers. Hard to identify. Drowned in the noise, mixed in with those that borrow the vocabulary of craftsmanship without the practice.
“Made with passion.” “Inspired by tradition.” “Premium quality.” “Engineered in San Francisco.”
Turn the product over: Made in Bangladesh, in tiny print. Designed in a SoMa loft, sewn in a Dhaka factory, in conditions nobody wants to look at too closely.
The geography of prestige without the geography of manufacturing.
And then there’s the hypocrisy. Buying a t-shirt whose cotton was harvested in Uzbekistan, spun in India, dyed in China, sewn in Bangladesh and sold in Paris (all for nine euros) while boasting about not flying anymore. The materials in that t-shirt have been around the world twenty times before reaching the wardrobe. But it’s the consumer’s flight that’s the problem, not the merchandise’s.
This guide I’ve always wanted to publish, it starts here. In a different form, but with the same intention: sorting. This brand still makes where it says it makes. That one was bought out, and here’s what changed. This other one is excellent but overpriced. And this one, little-known, is truly worth a look.
The deliberate mess
If the goal were to make money, I would have chosen a vertical. Watches. Knives. Shoes. A clean niche, targeted SEO, well-crafted partnerships. That’s what serious people do.
This guide mixes knives, casseroles, boots, pens, bicycles and hi-fi amplifiers.
It’s a mess. It’s deliberate.
Because what interests me isn’t the category: it’s the gesture. The precision of a watch movement, the grain of slowly tanned leather, the weight of a tool you never replace.
I’m passionate about photography, watches, cars, woodworking, shoes, fabrics, old things (a non-exhaustive list, unfortunately). Worlds with nothing in common except one thread: the care given to things. Manufacturing. Manual work. The beauty of simplicity.
This guide looks like the person who writes it: curious about everything, obsessed with nothing but the quality of the making.
The rules
No advertising. No affiliate links. No sponsored content. No Amazon links. There aren’t even cookies on this site.
Independence is total because it’s simple: here, nobody buys me. I’m the one who buys, always have been. I have a life, a career in tech (which, incidentally, makes it easier to build websites than books). No brand pays me, none knows me, and most probably don’t know they’re listed here.
That’s the baseline: if a brand can influence what we write about it, what we write is worthless.
We don’t rate either. No score out of 10, no stars. We tell the story, say what we think, flag the reservations when there are any. A verdict, not a ranking.
The long game
What interests me is the long game. Not the product of the season, but the one that outlasts them. Not the brand that buzzes, but the one that will still be here in thirty years.
It’s a bet. Some brands in this guide may be gone tomorrow. Others will have been bought out and hollowed of their substance. That’s the risk. But it’s also what makes the subject alive: things change, owners change, quality fluctuates. A frozen guide is useless. This one evolves.
Things done well don’t need advertising. They need to be shown.
That’s all we’re trying to do here. Show.
Whether this experiment works or not doesn’t matter. It helps me say out loud what I think quietly, to put this frustration somewhere. If others think the way I do, let them write, speak up, share this text. It would help me feel less alone.