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> Alton Industries makes all Stanley and most Porter-Cable vacs, as well as most Dewalt wet/dry vacuums! Understanding these relationships can be important for
by ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Alton Industries makes all Stanley and most Porter-Cable vacs, as well as most Dewalt wet/dry vacuums! Understanding these relationships can be important for your vacuum choice. You might love well Dewalt manufacturers its drills, but that would not be a reason to purchase a large Dewalt vac, since it's not manufactured by them—Dewalt licensed their brand name for vacuums to Alton Industries.
We have gone from branding that consumers revognise to branding spesifically being used to mislead and confuse customers. Hwat went wrong in the market?
- adamsmith143 4y agoWhat went wrong? What do you mean. The market is operating as intended, it just found yet another way to extract profit from consumers. This time by misleading them about the quality of a product by leveraging a known brand.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoI believe the OP means what went wrong for consumers.
- adamsmith143 4y agoThe market is a system for profit maximization system not consumer benefit.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y agoI think the short answer is that brands as a legitimate thing (a method by which a given maker-of-things could distinguish its products) were a relatively recent invention in human commerce, and were exploitable on a way that only even more recently was discovered. Essentially turns out the approach has a fatal flaw and that flaw has been exposed.
- nerdponx 4y agoI suspect that this flaw has been exploited for a long time, and I also would assert that brands have been "a thing" for a long time. A brand is just a systematic attempt by a business to develop name recognition among customers and potential customers.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> brands as a legitimate thing were a relatively recent invention in human commerce The origins of Stella Artois can be traced to 1366 when the Den Hoorn brewery was established in Leuven, Belgium I am sure even cavemen traded sharpened rocks and said 'this one is made by steve, he is really good, so I want more meat for it'
- buildbot 4y agoCould be as simple as metric gaming? Brands where a good metric, but of course, once we decided that, they were not anymore.
- zwieback 4y agoNoticed that at work where we have lots of DeWalt. The vacs are not great.
- bombcar 4y agoThey suck because they don't suck?
- tptacek 4y agoAn entertaining aspect of this is in whiskey, where, for instance, Wild Turkey makes one of the more successful and appreciated bourbons on the market, but also has a very popular rye, which they don't distill: Wild Turkey Rye is a relabeled MGPI whiskey. A surprising number of whiskeys are MGPI.
- bombcar 4y agoBecause bourbon takes (something like) ten years to "age" if you want to start a bourbon distillery you either have money to run ten years with no product, or you white label something else for ten years until you get your own going. So many industries are like this, just out of sight of the average customer, it's hilarious.
- kasey_junk 4y agoWorse than that, in KY you have to pay taxes on the whiskey as it ages. MGP is located in Indiana so does not face that tax.
- kyleee 4y agotalk about taxing unrealized gains
- kasey_junk 4y agoWhiskey also evaporates while it ages but the tax is on the full barrel.
- marcrosoft 4y agoThis happens all the time. Quaker State for example is a marketing company they don’t manufacture a drop of oil.
- IgorPartola 4y agoIt is similar to rent seeking behavior: create a super high quality product with a strong brand name. Then once it gets popular, switch to a cheap product but keep the same brand name. Keep price the same, lower your costs, get more $$. Part of the problem is also that knock off manufacturing is now quick and pretty good. Snap-On initially had a huge lead on the market because (a) they invented something new and (b) nobody could quickly replicate what they had. Now if they come out with a new type of wrench within a year others will copy the design at a fraction of the cost and it will be almost as good. In most cases it will be way better value for the money.
- reaperducer 4y agoIt started many decades ago, when low-rent importers and manufacturers bought the rights to out-of-business brand names, then started slapping them on all kinds of cheap junk and advertising them on TV. Even though it had its own store at the Mall of America, "As Seen On TV" is a red flag, not a badge of honor. Think Crosley record players, or different anti-itch powders, and such. Some managed to be just-good-enough to crawl back into becoming a real brand with real manufacturing. But some remained just junk, only to disappear again. Or, in other cases, the manufacturer of cheap Chinese junk will contract with a well-known American brand to put their brand on the junk and offer it as a discount to the American company's existing customers. Readers' Digest clock radios is a good example. Looking through Goodwill will reveal dozens of these brands, and their junk just before it hits the landfill.
- dpeck 4y agowords no longer mean things. We’re living in a world where nearly everything is low quality. It’s the old Sam Vimes narrative about being poor being expensive, but it is currently challenging for people of any means to find a quality product without loads of research and expertise. And even then, it’s subject to change as good brands get bought by someone larger or new management comes in and cuts quality to increase margins.
- itsoktocry 4y ago>We’re living in a world where nearly everything is low quality. Can you actually list items that, on a price-adjusted level, are lower quality? Nearly everything is of higher quality and cheaper than it ever was.
- kennywinker 4y agoFridges come to mind, but it depends on what you mean by “quality”. I had a 8 year old fridge, and attempted to replace a shelf bracket that broke because the plastic was flimsy - no parts available after 5 years. By 9 years old the brackets that held the large fan in the back of it in place had crumbled to dust. Meanwhile fridges from the 1960s are still humming along fine. The crumbly new fridge is more energy efficient by a long shot than that workhorse hold fridge - so it does depend on what you consider quality, but longevity and repairability are definitely major factors in what I consider quality.
- throwbigdata 4y agoAre there quality new fridges? Are Subzero fridges quality?
- NegativeLatency 4y agoI’ve heard they’re becoming less reliable than they used to be
- _ea1k 4y ago
- mc32 4y agoI agree that often brands take advantage of their goodwill and take white label products and brand them as their own. One very popular product was subcompact cars in the '80s when GM, Ford, etc., needed something to offer in a segment they had no expertise in or manufacturing capacity, so they had third string Japanese and S Korean MFs pump out stuff and rebadge them as their own. Often these rebranded Daihatsus, Ssanyang, etc., sucked... but so did Chevy and GM in many respects anyway. That said, if a brand is quality conscious and can filter on our behalf, I don't see the problem. A perfect example is Apple. They have someone MFG their designs to spec and we receive a quality product.
- kennywinker 4y agoIt took me a few tries to read “MFs” as “manufacturers”.
- mc32 4y agoHeh, yeah, I see now where MFs might read as MFers!
- prpl 4y agoCraftsman never manufactured their own things, it was always contracted out. So long as DeWalt is fine with the quality and supports the product I don’t see the difference
- aardvarkr 4y agoIn this case it’s dewalt, one of the most premium high end tool brands, selling their brand recognition to porter cable, the lowest of the low end tools.
- NegativeLatency 4y agoIMO dewalt is a mod tier tool brand with stuff like festool, powermatic, laguna and others being more premium high end
- petee 4y agoPorter Cable actually used to be great and dewalt was iffy, ive never heard anyone consider Dewalt to be premium though... Either way they sell the same tools now in just different colors, like their mid-size trim router is exactly the same but in Dewalt, PC or (i forget the third brand i saw, same router though) colors I usually use the AK-47 as an example for Dewalt -- they use such sloppy bearings and construction there isnt much to wear out that it doesnt work. Its not well built, just sloppy enough to take a beating
- briffle 4y agoInteresting, I use my dad's old Porter Cable Router from the 80's, and its rock solid (they also owned Delta). Looks like in 2004 they were bought by Black and Decker.
- petee 4y agoIronically, another manufacturer that used to make great tools but went 'consumer'. I got to use an old +20yr B&D circular saw not long ago and it was still fantastic
- 4y ago
- itsoktocry 4y ago>spesifically being used to mislead and confuse customers. You trust the brand to outsource manufacturing to high-quality suppliers. They're outsourcing 99% of all components anyway. Apple does this. What is the difference?
- Cpoll 4y agoApple designs the object made up of those components, selects the suppliers and QAs the components. They're directly involved in the manufacturing. Dewalt (Stanley, etc.) is doing none of that, they're just white-labelling. Essentially in this relationship Dewalt is a marketer.
- LukeShu 4y ago(without knowing the details of the DeWalt/Alton deal) There's a difference between "you can design and sell products under our brand" and "manufacture our design for us". And Apple will even do the reverse, arranging for Apple-designed products to be sold under someone else's brand, if they don't believe that the design is up to usual Apple quality.
- finnh 4y agoWhat are examples of Apple doing the reverse?
- LukeShu 4y agoApple's wireless charger design wasn't up to snuff in time for the iPhone 8/X release date, so they arranged for someone else (Belkin?) to sell the design under their brand, so that there would be a decent wireless charger available on release day, but without sullying the Apple brand. Source: Knew an Apple engineer who was involved with said charger.
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- samstave 4y agohttps://www.importyeti.com/supplier/suzhou-alton-electrical-mechanical-industrial https://www.importyeti.com/supplier/suzhou-alton-electrical-... Here is the likely chinese manufacturer
- michaelt 4y ago> Hwat went wrong in the market? If you're the CEO of a company, licensing out your brand seems like free money, in the short term. If you're a well known international brand of backhoes, and somebody offers you $x00k/year to put your logo on their line of disposable batteries? No cost to you, no effort needed on your part, it's pure profit. It's only in the medium term you run into problems - if they're shitty batteries, that might damage your reputation and harm your backhoe sales. Or even if they're perfectly good batteries, having your name on consumer-grade disposable items might be a poor association if your main business is all about industrial multi-decade-life products. Oh, some CEOs would resist the siren song of free money. But others will ignore the 'fuzzy marketing mumbo-jumbo' about 'brand reputation' and comfort themselves with the assumption their customers are sophisticated enough to know the batteries don't reflect on the backhoes. Nobody expects Harley-Davidson baseball caps to be made in a Harley-Davidson factory, after all! And if you've moved jobs before the reputation impact shows up on the bottom line, it'll look like you did a great job.
- wmeredith 4y agoThis is called cashing out brand equity. Your brand is worth something as a signal. You can cash in on that. If you do it poorly, though, it reduces brand equity. If you do it well, then it is in fact free money other than the time spent on due diligence researching your contractors. An example of someone currently doing that well is Kirkland house brands at Costco. They are universally known for being an incredible value and just as good or superior to the name brand stuff on the shelf next to them. An example of someone currently doing it poorly is Pendleton, who is known for making wool blankets that cost $500 and last generations. They have been putting their name all over $20 plastic fleece blankets in the last year or so.
- kyleee 4y agoironically selling the crappy blankets at Costco
- waynesonfire 4y agofurthermore, whether its Alton or Acme Industries it's all the same made in China.
- ericd 4y agoHuh? There is huge variability between factories. It’s not like a country of a billion plus people is doing the same quality work throughout…
- twobitshifter 4y agoIn kitchen stuff, licensing out brand names is really bad with kitchen aid. Their mixers are a known quantity but by anything else and you’re getting subpar quality at inflated prices. For tools, it’s not only brand licensing but mass consolidation. Brands are used similar to car manufacturers. https://www.protoolreviews.com/power-tool-manufacturers-who-owns-them/ https://www.protoolreviews.com/power-tool-manufacturers-who-... Milwaukee Ryobi Rigid and Hart (found at walmart) are all the same manufacturer. I own mostly Milwaukee tool, bought something from Ryobi and had it break right away.
- Freestyler_3 4y agoI remember being confused how kitchenaid and competitors calculate how strong they are. The machine has a HP rating and a Wattage, the HP was higher than the wattage when converted. So after some reading it turns out they have a special way of measuring HP. It still confuses me.
- shortstuffsushi 4y agoI might be naively interpreting this, but isn't "ownership" of a brand different than manufacturing? For instance, TTI owns Milwaukee, Ryobi... etc, but if I understand correctly, they each still manufacture independently. This would be different from the car manufacturers, where the actual components put into the car are often the same between differing brands under one larger owner (Nissan and Infiniti for instance)
- TylerE 4y agoA salient example is GE. GE has not manufactured consumer products in decades. All of those “GE” appliances were developed and built by somebody else.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoGE consumer products are made by Haier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier
- Blackthorn 4y agoTools get another dimension of that too which can be very frustrating. I live in the USA and I generally consider Makita (which also doesn't have any other brands or lines, it's just Makita) to be a high-quality tool brand that I'm happy to use and happy to own in the garage. I think most people would agree with that assessment as well. But the Makita tools we get here have nothing on the Makita tools that are actually available in Japan. It's like another tier entirely. I sure wish we could get all that good stuff here.
- sosuke 4y agoThere are some teardowns on YouTube that show exactly that. AvE I believe has one or two for Makita. I really enjoy his channel. Warning he can be a little crass.
- kyleee 4y agomore accurately, a lot crass (i personally generally enjoy it)
- etrautmann 4y agoI used to think that as well, but I've seen three crosscut saws that all lost the thumb switch button, and the general build quality just doesn't seem up to what I would expect.
- SoftTalker 4y agoAlmost all car batteries in North America are made by two companies: Exide, or Johnson Controls.
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