Sometime in the last eighteen months, "Made in Canada" went from a nice-to-have on a label to a genuine reason people choose one brand over another. A recent BNN Bloomberg piece on the buy-Canadian movement's one-year mark found that 74% of Canadians say they'll keep buying Canadian-made products even if U.S. tariffs get lifted. That's not a panic response to a headline; that's a preference that's settling in for good.
We noticed the shift too. More customers asking where things are actually made. More questions in our DMs about our supply chain. More people telling us, unprompted, that the "Made in Canada" line on our product pages is what tipped them from browsing to buying.
Here's the thing we want to be honest about: we didn't build our supply chain because we saw this coming. We built it this way because it was the only way we knew how to make a product we'd actually trust - and it happens to be very on-trend right now.
So here's what "Made in Canada" actually means for do+dare, laid out plainly, because we think specifics matter more than the phrase itself:
The labels come from Markham, Ontario. Small detail, but it's one more step that could easily have been outsourced to save a few cents per unit. It wasn't.
The waistband and thread come from Montreal. These are the parts of a pair of underwear that fail first if the materials are cheap: the stitching that lets go after 20 washes, the waistband that rolls or loses its stretch. Sourcing them domestically means we're working with suppliers we can actually call, not a factory eight time zones away we're hoping is following spec.
Everything is sewn in Scarborough. Not "designed in Canada, made elsewhere," which is a distinction that matters more than people sometimes realize. The construction - the part that determines whether a pair of underwear survives a year of daily wear or falls apart in three months - happens here, on our watch.
This matters more right now, not less. Ottawa's federal Buy Canadian Policy came into effect this past December, restricting non-defence government contracts to Canadian suppliers wherever possible. Steel and aluminum tariff measures just got extended through mid-2027. Canadian manufacturers - real ones, the ones running plants and paying workers here - are under genuine pressure, with mills and fabricators across the country slowing or shuttering production. The backdrop to "buy Canadian" isn't a marketing trend. It's an actual, ongoing squeeze on the businesses that chose to stay.
We're not going to pretend our supply chain is some elaborate strategic bet we made years ago. It's smaller and more practical than that: Sarah wanted to be able to walk into the room where the sewing happens and see it for herself. Rob wanted suppliers he could call on a Tuesday and get a straight answer from. Neither of those things require an ocean between us and the product.
What we'd ask, if you're the kind of person who reads labels - and given you're this far into a blog post about waistbands, you probably are - is to keep asking the question you're already asking. Where was this actually made? Not "designed," not "conceived," not "inspired by." Made. It's a fair question, and increasingly, it's one more brands are going to have to answer honestly, tariffs or no tariffs.
We're glad more people are asking it. We've had the answer ready the whole time.
-Rob+Sarah
Sources: BNN Bloomberg - Buy Canadian movement one year on | Canada.ca - Buy Canadian Policy | Canada.ca - steel and aluminum tariff extension