The Fine Print Under a Made in USA Sneaker

Turn over a New Balance 990 on a shelf in Boston, the company's home city, and the tongue reads "Made in USA." Look closer, in type small enough that most shoppers skip it, and a second line qualifies the first: domestic value of 70 percent or greater. That qualifier is not a marketing flourish. It is the product of three decades of argument with the federal government over what those three words are allowed to mean.

The Federal Trade Commission's standard for an unqualified "Made in USA" claim is "all or virtually all": every significant part and every significant stage of processing has to happen on U.S. soil. New Balance's own standard, printed on its own boxes, is looser. A shoe can carry the tag once 70 percent of its value, by a metric the company calls "domestic value" and has never publicly defined, is domestic. The other 30 percent has for years included the outsole.

The domestic side is real and specific: New Balance runs five factories across Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire, including a large plant in Lawrence and a recently expanded one in Skowhegan that absorbed a smaller Norridgewock facility the company closed in 2024. Together they employ roughly 1,200 workers who cut, mold, sew, and press the components sourced domestically. What those factories do not make, for the American-made 990 series, is the rubber outsole, which has come from overseas suppliers for years.

The company has said as much in public. In a 2011 interview with Fox Business, then chairman Jim Davis acknowledged that the soles on New Balance's American-made shoes were not made domestically. The gap between what the tongue implies and what the shoe contains is not something investigators uncovered; it is a distinction the company has defended, in writing, for years.

It has also cost money, twice. The FTC investigated New Balance's domestic-manufacturing claims in the 1990s, and in 1997 the company lobbied the agency for a 50 percent domestic-content threshold in place of the stricter standard. The FTC dropped its case without New Balance conceding the point, and without endorsing the company's number either. A class action revived the argument two decades later: a suit covering purchases from January 2012 through January 2019 ended in a 2019 settlement, New Balance paying 750,000 dollars and agreeing to disclose the 70 percent figure more clearly, without admitting wrongdoing.

That settlement did not end the argument. In the summer of 2021, the FTC finalized a new Made in USA Labeling Rule, giving itself authority to fine violators tens of thousands of dollars for each offending label. That September, the advocacy group Truth in Advertising filed its own complaint against New Balance with the agency. By December, a new class action had named specific retro silhouettes directly: the 990v2 through 990v5, the 992, the 993, and the 1540v3, alleging that roughly 30 percent of each shoe, soles included, came from two Chinese manufacturers. A federal judge in Massachusetts declined to dismiss the case in December 2022, finding the plaintiffs had adequately alleged that New Balance's disclosures fell short. The suit ended in a settlement this past May, dismissed with the named plaintiffs' consent, on terms the parties did not make public.

None of this touches New Balance's other domestic line, made an ocean away. The company's Flimby factory in Cumbria, England, running since 1982, produces the shoes sold as Made in UK: the 991, the 1500, the 920. Those silhouettes run slimmer and more tailored than the American-made 990 series, and the process leans on handwork rather than assembly; workers at Flimby are said to pass a single 991 through roughly thirty pairs of hands before it leaves the building. Nothing in the public record ties that line to a domestic-content dispute the way the Massachusetts and Maine factories have faced. It is a separate factory, making a separate shape, under whatever convention the UK applies to "Made in England," a different question this dispute does not settle.

What both lines share is the reason a shoe carries a country label at all in the retro category: heritage. A silhouette built in 1982 sells today partly on the claim that it is still built the way it always was, where it always was. That claim carries real weight for a narrow slice of the retro sneaker market. Most retro reissues, from most brands, are made entirely overseas with no domestic-content claim to defend or litigate in the first place. New Balance's American and British lines sit close to alone in making the country of manufacture part of the pitch, which is exactly why the 70 percent figure matters more on this shelf than it would on a shoe that never claimed otherwise.

None of this makes the 70 percent figure a secret, and none of it means the shoes are mislabeled under the standard New Balance uses for itself. The company discloses the number; it discloses it in the type size reserved for information a buyer is not expected to read while standing in a store. The FTC's stricter definition and New Balance's own definition are simply not the same rule, and a shopper comparing a "Made in USA" 990 to an import has to decide which definition they assumed when they picked it up.

That is the part a shelf tag cannot settle on its own. A tongue that says "Made in USA" is telling the truth as its maker defines truth, a definition arrived at through two decades of litigation rather than disclosed in full at the point of sale. Anyone weighing a heritage sneaker on the strength of where it was built now has a second question worth asking before the first: built how much, and by whose percentage.

Sources: Federal Register · Federal Trade Commission