Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Owns a Whole Collection of Secret Brands (qz.com)
Mike Murphy, writing for Quartz: After decades of selling products -- and knowing exactly what people are buying, and when they are buying it -- Amazon has started cutting out the middle-man by selling self-produced items. Through its AmazonBasics house brand, it sells all sorts of small items, from iPhone chargers, to batteries, power strips -- even foam rollers, backpacks and washcloths. It's the sort of stuff that you might not be too brand loyal over -- who really minds whether it's a Duracell or a Panasonic battery? Amazon sees that a product is selling well, and may decide to work with manufacturers to make the product itself -- it's a tactic that is already worrying vendors, and can't bode well for partnerships in the long run. But those are the obvious instances. Now, Amazon is selling products across a wide array of categories, using a host of brands that do not exist outside the confines of amazon.com and do not make it clear that they are Amazon-made products. Trawling through over 800 trademarks that Amazon has either been awarded or applied for through the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Quartz identified 19 brands that are owned by Amazon and sell products or have product pages on amazon.com: Arabella, for lingerie products; Beauty Bar for cosmetics; Denali for tools; Franklin & Freeman for men's shoes; Happy Belly for fresh food; James & Erin for women's clothing; Lark & Ro for women's clothing; Mae for underwear; Mama Bear for baby products; Myhabit for consumer goods; North Eleven for women's clothing; NuPro for tech accessories; Pike Street for linen; Pinzon (by Amazon) for linen; Scout + Ro for kid's clothing; Single Cow Burger for frozen food; Small Parts for spare parts; Smart is Beautiful for clothing; and Strathwood for furniture.
Make this out like this is some big bad monopolistic move, but every major retail company sells private-label goods. Whether it's Wal-Mart with its Ozark Trail or Mainstays, Aldi / Trader Joes and almost every product, or Target and Market Pantry, Archer Farms, etc.
This is not nearly news. AmazonBasics is very old news.
I did see Happy Belly products on an asian Amazon site. I'm not sure if they have many US products under that brand yet.
... Small Parts for spare parts ...
I can't speak to the other brands, but Small Parts was an independent vendor of small hardware (think tiny screws, nuts, tubing, tools, etc.) that was legion within the scientific and engineering community. Small Parts and McMaster (and maybe MSC from time to time), and that's all you needed to build stuff from tiny to massive. SP had a small in-house engineering staff do to things like cut tubing to length, if you wanted it, too, and they always did a superlative job, even for super-ultra tiny stuff like 32 ga cannulae (substantially smaller than the smallest hypotermic needle that most people would have ever encountered).
Then, Amazon bought Small Parts and it went to hell in a handbasket. I haven't bothered trying to buy anything from SP for a long while because what was once a highly functional web site became a gawd-awful mess. You used to search for, say, "stainless tubing" and get a nice array of selections that allowed you to use drop-down menus to set the different aspects and quickly get a price for exactly what you wanted. Or, you'd search for "spring wire" and get the same highly structured, easy-to-navigate page. Now, you get thousands of individual results and no way to navigate through them to the particular one you want. Bloody mess.
So, this is one instance where the suggested house brand is in fact NOT a house brand, but an absorbed B-to-B vendor. And one that got ruined by being expanded into the vastness of Amazon.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
What's insidious here is Amazon is looking through their data, seeing things from Company X that are selling well, and then short-circuiting that company's supply chain to procure and sell their own knock-off. Company X basically did all the market research and product development, and Amazon steals it reaps the rewards for basically free. Company X is now screwed.