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Comment by twobitshifter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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/

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.

That chart is an incredible eye-opener.

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