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.

Comments

Just like every store

[omnichad]

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.

Re:Just like every store

[jellomizer]

A lot of smaller stores does this as well. Back in the days before every business decision seems to have a deep underhanded conspiracy, they use to call them generic brands, often sold at a lower price. Because you are not paying for the brand name. Or sometimes they will make their own product at a higher quality and put a fancy premium name on it. To get peoples attention.

While Amazon would probably be happy that people may choose their brands. It isn't like there is a huge advertising push to get these brands well recognized.

Re:Just like every store

[EvilSS]

Walmart etc isn't an auction site where I go into the store and put my items for sale however.

They're directly competing with you if you sell well on their site, it's a bit different.

Are you maybe confusing Amazon with eBay? Amazon is not an auction site by any stretch of the imagination. Now if you are talking about sites with third party sellers, then yes, actually walmart.com is exactly that. Thousands of third party sellers on there. Sears.com as well, btw.

Just like every other major retailer

[GrumpySteen]

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.

Re:Just like every other major retailer

[EvilSS]

Sears *HAD* Craftsman, recently sold it though

Ah Sears, the company that should have been what Amazon is today, but instead is in a slow, inevitable death spiral instead.

Batteries?

[QuietLagoon]

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.

Not Small Parts

[pz]

... 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.

Re:Not Small Parts

[pz]

Yes, exactly. The difference between Google / Amazon / Yahoo (flat) search and McMaster (categorized) search is that when one is using the first kind, there are many different results any one of which will probably suffice --- "womens sneakers", "usb-c webcam", "organic toothpaste" --- but with categorized search, one wants not just a screw, but a stainless steel, panhead, philips drive, 8-32 machine screw that is 5/16 inch long. Almost no other screw will do if that's what you need, and matches from other thread sizes, other lengths, or other head styles aren't often useful. It's a far more precise style of search, and under those circumstances, tree-based, or drop-down-based selection is far, far faster. McMaster gets this incredibly right.

McMaster (and, formerly Small Parts) also get another thing right that Amazon utterly fails at: quality. When I buy something from McMaster, there's often a premium price involved, but I have near absolute certainty that what I will be purchasing will do the job, and do it well. They also often offer a highly limited selection. Want a set of wire cutters? Other than different sizes, or different cutting angles, you essentially have one choice. With Amazon, they expand along the price/quality axis which appears to work well for them, but is frustrating for former customers of Small Parts and current customers of McMaster. I don't need to see two dozen different options for 13-piece drill bit sets, I just need to have one, maybe two, and know that they are both good. I don't need to see twenty different rebadged versions of the identical crappy oriental product; just a couple better versions that will work well.

Nevertheless, sometimes you don't want to spend $30 on a high-quality American-made tool when the $10 Chinese knockoff is good enough for your 5-minute use-it-once application. If there were a slider where one could trade off price against, say, customer rating, and get the best matching option for one's desired price-point, well, that could be useful.

Re:Not Small Parts

[John.Banister]

McMaster used to be famous for never telling you the brand name, just describing the functionality, so that they could switch brands as they found a better priced product for achieving the same goal. However, you can find a selection of different quality levels for some tools by looking at differences in the described function. Their "pipe and conduit thread repairing taps" (which can shatter if you drop them on a hard surface) are a much more inexpensive way to have the larger sizes on hand, especially if you're mostly using them to clean up rusty pipe fittings or hand tap pvc. However, they're nothing like the quality of the same size pipe tap in the "pipe and conduit thread taps for hardened steel" category. Similarly, the $35 4066A75 6" diameter hole saw isn't something I'd want to use even on wood, but it's great for adding new passageways to insulating concrete forms and is less expensive than any 6" hole saw I might find locally. The $109 4002A54 6 1/2" dia hole saw and the $267 4002A64 6" diameter hole saw are of significantly better quality, and that's without yet transitioning to the ones with carbide teeth.

One impression I get from McMaster is that they're using tags rather than trees, so that they avoid the shelf organizer's dilemma of "do I put all the mild steel bolts together and then sub sort into inch and metric, or do I put all the Inch together and then subsort into mild and stainless?" RockAuto on the other hand, actually has trees, as no other distinctions matter until the "will it fit" imperative has been met.

One thing that might be interesting for McMaster to try is to allow customers to add their own tags (stored in a big cookie, not messing up the tags for everyone else), so that a customer might tag a 6-32 x 5/16 oval head slotted with "electrical wall plate" or some other locally significant use that could make repeat searching faster. If they see a statistically significant percentage of customers having a similar tag for a product, that might inform additions to their official tag collection.

Hmmmmm

[Oswald McWeany]

What if Amazon secretly own Wal-Mart.

How is that different from "brands"?

[bickerdyke]

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.

I think what everyone is missing...

[thomn8r]

Yeah, other companies have their own in-house brands. We get it.

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.

So?

[BitztreamNotARealNam]

How's life in the hypocrite lane?