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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.
Wal-Mart has Sam's Choice, Great Value, Equate, Mainstays, Ol' Roy, Dr. Thunder, Special Kitty, Parent's Choice, Price First, etc.
Kroger has Big K, Fresh Selections, Home Sense, Pet Pride, Private Selection, Simple Truth, Abound, etc.
Sears has DieHard, Kenmore, Craftsman, etc.
This is not new behavior.
Woman shoes (at least 4 brands) and man clothing (another 4).
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Buying batteries on Amazon seems to be more or less a crap-shoot. Looking at the comments, there seems to be a lot of knock-off, e.g., Duracell, batteries being sold and Amazon doesn't seem to care about it. Maybe Amazon has looked the other way to make room from their own brand of batteries, or maybe they really just don't care , so long as the sale goes through. Who knows? But I'll never buy batteries on Amazon.
... 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 if Amazon secretly own Wal-Mart.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They have been using the data they get from sales of niche stores products to decide to outcompete said niche store by going direct to their producer/supplier and making them 'an offer they can't refuse.'
The result of this is *EVERYBODY* is too weak to compete with Amazon toe to toe, but nowadays anyone who wants to sell their goods online is stuck between Amazon, ebay, newegg and alibaba, and only the first is considered reputable for the broad variety of goods and the private stores selling through it. There are some even niche-er venues like etsy and what have you, but if you're selling something that doesn't qualify for those other niche storefronts, you're pretty much stuck going to amazon to sell your wares. And if amazon is going to SWAT YOU DOWN and STEAL YOUR HARD WORK as soon as your business is becoming financially successful, why bother starting it in the first place?
The modern world is literally eliminating the room for the little guy without eliminating the need.
If you're in the mood for a $5 burger patty, it's not a bad deal. The clothing is unexpectedly good, too.
Kriston
On one level, I don't care -- repeated testing shows that the big name batteries do not tend to perform better than house-brand cheapies.
On the other hand, I do care because name brand batteries are insanely expensive compared to the cheap brands that perform at least equally as well.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public,"
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
The middle of this story will be filled with golden excess. But it won't end well.
I'm using the Panasonic rechargeable batteries and they're awesome. Over 150 charges and they seem to last as long as ever.
If they can do it, why not? Middlemen only make sense if they add value, and if Amazon can go directly to the manufacturer, all the better.
It isn't uncommon that the brand owner doesn't own a production plant but already outsourced that to China and buys its own products labeled and packaged.
bickerdyke
Well, that's actually understandable... sometimes sellers don't check all the boxes, sometimes they don't list features in the correct places. So the math if fine: 25 brakes, 19 without, and 98 "unknown."
Not that I disagree with the searching being terrible, just that I have learned to accept a few things as actually not being Amazon's fault. One thing to do is actually click on that "Didn't find what you want?" link at the bottom of the page and tell them why their search sucks.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
I don't care if Amazon has its own labels.
What I care about is when I buy a product and come to suspect later that that the company selling it didn't have any intention of shipping the order. They presumaby just deceived Amazon into passing the order to them so they can collect the money upon feigning shipping the goods using apparently fake tracking numbers and hope that they don't always have to refund the money.
I have to wonder how many people actually follow through and claim their money back, presumably not 100% and even then at least they get to keep your money for a few weeks
Nullius in verba
U.S. CODE. Title 4, Chapter 1. 8 "Respect for Flag" -- (a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Sometimes Amazon deliberately hides results. Not sure why - but you can often find things on Amazon with a Google search that are impossible to find through the on site search, even if you type words directly from the title or description. I assume these are products that they don't really want to sell, but they carry them so that Amazon comes up in any internet search for that item.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They're getting a good name in lithium batteries also. I've seen some sellers of 18650s advertise that they buy Panasonic cells and add their own button, protection circuit and label.
Dollar stores don't sell alkalines for a dollar. They sell carbon-zinc "heavy duty" batteries. And since heavy duty means something totally different from what people thinks it means in this context, they still get away with selling loads of them.
Dollar tree has 8 packs of carbon zinc AA cells and 2 packs of alkaline AA cells. The alkalines have precisely 4x the capacity which makes me feel good about their pricing.
Man, you really need that seminar!
It's bitztream the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating, Qualcomm-hating, Firefox tabs-hating Slashdot troll!
Here is the final stage of offshoring manufacturing. Billions were made by importers who did not directly manufacture, but instead contracted the manufacture of their products to overseas manufacturers.
This is the warning shot - if you are successful doing this, Amazon is coming for you. You will do the market research, product development and marketing - then Amazon will simply take the business from you.
Any business that does not own its manufacturing and storefront is at risk.
Witness BitZtream getting pwned!... twice.....three times!
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
A 2-pack is believable, but I was thinking 4-pack in my mind.