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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 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?

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> 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.

This 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.

ironically selling the crappy blankets at Costco

>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?

Apple 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.

(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.

What are examples of Apple doing the reverse?

Apple'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.

words 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.

>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.

Fridges 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.

Are there quality new fridges? Are Subzero fridges quality?

I’ve heard they’re becoming less reliable than they used to be

Its weird that noone really deeply analyzes this. Munro started a teardown, but it ended somewhat abruptly and with only fairly surface level analysis, IMO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAYj6m9QtDU&t=1s

> Meanwhile fridges from the 1960s are still humming along fine.

Fridges that you see from the 1960s are still humming along fine. All the ones that broke decades ago get none of your attention. This is survivorship bias. Reliability of products like fridges has gone up immensely over the last 50 years.

I'm not sure about the 1960s, but generally all appliances have gotten quite a bit cheaper and had less durability and repairability since the eighties. There was a step change in the late nineties both in price and quality when production moved to China.

That might be true. But I don't think there will be ANY of the model of fridge I had running at 20 years old. Survivorship bias can't account for plastic that crumbles from being heat-cycled.

On the bright side, a shelf bracket is a pretty cheap wear item to replace. Can be 3d printed. It's not like any of the electronics went bad.

If I had a 3D printer, yes. But like most people, I don't have a 3d printer. $200-$1200 + a few days of learning trial and error is starting to get into the price range of just buying a new fridge.

Or you can hack it with Sugru: <https://sugru.com/what-is-sugru>. Not necessarily the best for aesthetics, unless you're a clay sculptor hobbyist or something, but it sticks tight to almost everything. Though as per the website: "Sugru does not bond to oily plastics like polypropylene, polyethylene or Teflon."

I've used it for all kinds of things. I tend to reinforce it if it's load-bearing (eg I made a bracket for my router under my desk, but molded the Sugru around a screw that I put in the desk). Each pack is very small, so it'll only be enough for corners or wrapping around wires very close to the end or whatever.

I’ve not had good luck with sugru. I’ve used it to repair a couple cables that started fraying near one end… the weird lump of sugru covered where i put it, but didn’t stop the fraying - bought me maybe another couple months of use.

Houses? Look at all the nice victorian houses built 100-150 years ago, for ‘average’ professionals. Solid wood doors everywhere, nicely finished walls , brass fixtures etc…

Compare this with the garbage we have in today’s McMansions … and weep.

Survivorship bias somewhat. There were plenty of people living in literal shacks 150 years ago.

Did those people buy the shacks for $1,000,000?

Because you can buy an newbuilt apartment in London for a million dollars and it will be absolute shit. Recently builders forgot to build balconies, forgot to lay down internet cable for a block of flats, and built and entire block wrong way round. They are worse than an average javascript app!

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/uknews/16419384/persimmon-buil...

these cowboy builders should learn to code

I've been saying the same for a while, but there are definitely some strange things going on with product quality and replacement cost.

Eg, my microwave has a vent cover on the top that tends to crack and fall off after less than 3 years. They company wants >$90 for the lightweight, simple plastic part.

I have a fridge with a long lasting LED light. The proprietary board that its mounted to failed after less than 4 years.

We've somehow managed to replace short lasting components (filament bulbs) with components that last longer (led) but fail in more costly ways. Somehow the manufacturer gets away with blaming laws (incandescent bulbs were banned, we say!) while also profiting from building things too cheaply.

Maybe that's true for small consumer expenses, but for things like shop vacs it's really not true. If you spend $100 on a shop vac you'll get a low end shop vac. If you spend $400 or more, you'll get a Bosch or a Festool or whatever the high end vacs are in the US, and it'll be a great shop vac. The amazing thing is that you can actually get decent shop vacs for around $150.

Which would you recommend around $150?

I really like my Karcher, I've used it for about 5 years now. It's been through a full gutting of my house and the subsequent rebuild and refinish.

If I had more money to spend I'd get an M-class vac, but the cheapest one is a Festool for 560 euros. It's not often that Festool is the cheapest in a category.

(I think the M/L class system is specific to The Netherlands: https://mastertools.nl/collections/bouwstofzuiger?refinement... basically M class means it's safe to use by professionals who work with stone dust for 8 hours per day).

In 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-...

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.

I 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.

I 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)

A salient example is GE. GE has not manufactured consumer products in decades. All of those “GE” appliances were developed and built by somebody else.

GE consumer products are made by Haier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier

GE Appliances designs and makes appliances, and never stopped, but they've been owned by Haier, not GE, since 2016. Sort of a subtle distinction, but it matters.

There's some debate on the level of coordination, e.g. market segmentation, sales data, some component sharing, possible factory sharing, https://toolguyd.com/milwaukee-ridgid-ryobi-coordinations/

kitchenaid has also been cheapening up their mixers in recent years... the $200 mixer at costco or your department store now has a much weaker motor and plastic gears that can tend to strip over time with certain workloads (particularly the bread-mixing attachment).

(the argument is that the plastic gear serves as a "mechanical fuse" and if something's going to break it's better that it be a $2 plastic gear instead of burning up your motor, but, in the big picture, they're also weakening up the motor, etc.)

Recent? Kitchenaid started reducing the price point of their entry level 40 years ago. Meanwhile their top end models have brushless DC motors and are as well designed as ever, and adjusted for inflation are cheaper than in the past.

Having dismantled many, the entry level kitchenaid design hasn’t changed much in the past two decades.

It turns out, and kitchenaid realized, there was a lot of money to be made by casual box cake mixers that want the appearance of a KA.

That chart is an incredible eye-opener.

I 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.

I 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.

> 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'

Tools 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.

There 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.

more accurately, a lot crass (i personally generally enjoy it)

I 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.

Craftsman 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

In 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.

IMO dewalt is a mod tier tool brand with stuff like festool, powermatic, laguna and others being more premium high end

Porter 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

Interesting, 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.

Ironically, 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

The idea that Dewalt is "one of the most premium high end tool brands" is ridiculous to anyone with even a modest understanding of tools. I wouldn't even consider Dewalt to be middle of the road when it comes to consumer hand tools, much less premium.

Premium tool brands are like Festool, Mafell, etc. Stuff that weekend warriors freak out about when they see the price tag. Dewalt just has a big marketing budget, recognizable colors, and is in every big box store.

The two dewalt impact drills which have had their chuck become detached from the motor under light work loads and the half dozen Porter Cable tools which I've used reliably on almost every DIY project for the last 10 years, all of which are sitting in my garage, suggest otherwise.

DeWalt has great ergonomics though.

Craftsman used to have a fantastic return policy

Not for power tools though. Only for hand tools.

Before Sears imploded, the power tools were mostly made by Black and Decker, which owns DeWalt but also makes a lot of low-end crap that ended up in the Craftsman line. I'm not sure who makes them now.

Sears sold the Craftsman name just recently for nearly a billion dollars. Stanley Black and Decker purchased it. Very confusing, because the agreement allows for both to use the name for a time...so your Sears Craftsman power tools aren't compatible with the Lowes ones.

A lot of the Made in USA Craftsman hand tools were made by Western Forge. There's usually a "WF" somewhere on the tool on those. These are generally good quality. Craftsman then moved production to China and the Western Forge plant shut down, although the company is still around.

It's not always clear these days when a tool is "Made in the USA" vs. "assembled in the USA from global components", https://www.protoolreviews.com/what-tools-are-made-in-the-us...

I 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.

It took me a few tries to read “MFs” as “manufacturers”.

Heh, yeah, I see now where MFs might read as MFers!

Could be as simple as metric gaming? Brands where a good metric, but of course, once we decided that, they were not anymore.

An 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.

Because 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.

Worse 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.

talk about taxing unrealized gains

Whiskey also evaporates while it ages but the tax is on the full barrel.

It 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.

It 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.

https://www.importyeti.com/supplier/suzhou-alton-electrical-...

Here is the likely chinese manufacturer

What 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.

I believe the OP means what went wrong for consumers.

The market is a system for profit maximization system not consumer benefit.

This happens all the time. Quaker State for example is a marketing company they don’t manufacture a drop of oil.

Almost all car batteries in North America are made by two companies: Exide, or Johnson Controls.

Noticed that at work where we have lots of DeWalt. The vacs are not great.

They suck because they don't suck?

furthermore, whether its Alton or Acme Industries it's all the same made in China.

Huh? There is huge variability between factories. It’s not like a country of a billion plus people is doing the same quality work throughout…

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