The 991v2 Sea Grass Comes From a Factory That Just Built a Garden

New Balance put the Made in UK 991v2 out in a pale sage suede this summer, and two things about it are harder to pin down than they should be. Nobody agrees on what the colorway is called, and New Balance never announced a release date for it. What is certain is where it was made, and that turns out to be the more interesting story anyway.

The 991 is a 2001 shoe. New Balance says so in its own product copy, calling it the first 99X model of the 21st century and crediting it with setting the standard for modern running design. That is worth stating precisely because retailers get it wrong: Lapstone & Hammer’s listing for this very pair describes it as an “original 1999 silhouette,” which contradicts the brand. The 991 then went 22 years without a successor. When the v2 finally came in 2023, New Balance launched it through a Stone Island exclusive on October 4 before the general release on October 18, and titled its own press release “the first update to a Flimby-made icon.” The changes were real rather than cosmetic. Full-length FuelCell went into the midsole, the ABZORB SBS pods and ENCAP carried over, and the Ndurance outsole lost its swooping stripe in favor of a FuelCell-branded cutout that lets the new foam expand on impact.

This pair is where the naming goes sideways. Retailers are close to unanimous on Sea Grass: Kith, Extra Butter, Stadium Goods, Solestop, Slam Jam, Above The Clouds and others all list U991BB2 as Sea Grass, most of them as “Sea Grass / Silver.” Sneaker Bar Detroit and Hypebeast both ran it as Sea Glass. Neither name can be checked against New Balance, because no product page for U991BB2 exists on newbalance.com, and dead New Balance product URLs redirect to a generic category page rather than returning a 404, so the absence is real. Sea Grass is the likelier of the two on pattern alone, since New Balance’s live 991v2 pages all follow a “[color] with [color]” construction that Sea Grass fits and Sea Glass does not. That is an inference, not a confirmation, and outlets that wrote Sea Glass are not obviously wrong.

Flimby is the part worth knowing. The Cumbrian village of under 2,000 people has been home to the Made in UK line since 1991, and New Balance has manufactured in the UK for more than 40 years. In a press release dated July 30 this year, the company put numbers to it: roughly 300 skilled workers producing approximately 30,000 pairs a month. The occasion for that release was not a shoe. New Balance had commissioned jewellery designer Bleue Burnham to build the factory’s first garden, a space for the people who make these shoes, with undulating flower beds, wildflower planting, pockets of water, flowering cherry trees and custom bird boxes. A brand that wanted to justify a Made in UK price tag could hardly have picked a better answer, and it went almost entirely uncovered in sneaker media.

Which brings up the premium, and it needs handling honestly. New Balance’s in-line Made in UK 991v2 pages run $269.99, though the line is not uniform and the Walnut pair sits at $249.99. US retailers list this colorway at a flat $270. Against that, Made in USA pricing is $184.99 for the 990v4 and $199.99 for both the 990v6 and the 993. The tempting line is that the roughly $70 gap buys a factory rather than a shoe. That only half holds. The 993 has no FuelCell at all and the 990v4 has neither FuelCell nor ABZORB, so both are genuinely lower-spec midsoles and cannot carry the comparison. The 990v6 is the only near-like-for-like, sharing FuelCell and ENCAP, and the 991v2 adds ABZORB SBS pods on top. So part of the gap is spec and the remainder is plausibly factory and volume, one plant in Flimby against five in New England. “Same shoe, more money, different country” is the version to avoid.

The market has its own view. On StockX the pair trades around $189 against a $270 retail, roughly 30 percent under, and it remains findable at Lapstone, Extra Butter, Solestop and Stadium Goods into September. New Balance ran a deep Made in UK 991v2 calendar this year, and a high drop cadence on a premium shoe tends to produce exactly this.

Sea Grass, U991BB2, released over the summer with no date announced by New Balance. Third-party trackers split between June 18 and July, so our release-date field stays empty rather than adopting a number nobody can source. Retail is $270 in the US and €250 at Kith Europe. More in our New Balance archive and on the 991v2 hub, alongside the Made in USA 990v4 that anchors the comparison above.

Source: Extrabutterny

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The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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