> Not to me confused with the Soviet shoe factories that produced only one type and orientation of shoe - with the other half of the pair being shipped in from 500 miles away.

This reminded me of something our anti-counterfeiting startup learned when integrating into manufacturing for a high-end outdoor apparel brand.

There are efficiencies that the factory gets by, say, parallelizing work on the sleeves of a jacket, while other parts are also worked on. But each batch of dyed outer material may have slight variation in color, no matter how hard they calibrate.

So, their processes are designed to ensure that, when the jacket pieces come together, they all came from the same dyed batch of outer material.

(There were many interesting tidbits like that, and those were just the ones relevant to us, in terms we could understand. I'm sure the factory also knew a million other things.)

Probably the Soviet shoes of TFA had worse problems than slightly mismatched color.