Appliance Brands Explained

What's in a name?

The manufacturers play the name game!

You may have read elsewhere that many appliances are not what they seem to be, or at least what the public expect them to be. Hopefully the following will shed some light on this subject.

The following is a list of known groups followed by the brand names that they own, we'll try to update this as often as we can to keep it up to date.

More often than not you will find the same appliance simply rebadged between brands with minor cosmetic differences and, in many cases a lot of the spares even crossover on groups as well so there is no guarantee that buying a particular brand will get you a unique product, in fact it probably won't!

The Big Groups

Electrolux Group:

Electrolux, Zanussi, AEG, Tricity-Bendix, Parkinson Cowan, Fridgidaire

Candy Group:

Candy, Hoover, Kelvinator, Iberna, Rosieres, Mayc, Gasfire, Zerowatt

Merloni Elettrodomestici:

Ariston, Indesit, Scholtes, Hotpoint, New World, Philco

Antonio Merloni:

Servis UK, Domar, Asko, many guises as this is Europe's largest third-party supplier of appliances.

Bosch/Neff/Siemens/Gaggenau:

All the same company

Elco Brandt Group:

Fagor, Brandt, De Dietrech, Blomberg (some, Comet's own brand), many more as also a third-party supplier

Glen Dimplex Group:

Stoves, Belling, also a third party supplier

Whirlpool:

Whirlpool, Ignis, Bauknecht, third party supplier particularly integrated refrigeration products

Why so many different names?

As you can see from the above the vast majority of major brand names are owned by someone else and, more often than not, the products are not unique to a particular brand. Some are, but not many to reduce manufacturing costs.

You can also see that "names" are worth money, if they were not then the manufacturers would not spend money on snapping up all the brands that they can.

The problem for manufacturers is that many appliances they may not sell very many of particularly when it comes to niche and integrated product where the demand is low but it could mean the difference between getting a large contract with a builder and not for new home installations. Or for appealing to the kitchen specialist markets and not having that one niche product can cost them the entire sale of several appliances. So manufacturers cannot afford to do small volume runs therefore they simply buy the appliances in "badged". A cheap and very effective solution for the manufacturer but very misleading to the customer.

The same thing happens with the freestanding appliances that you will see in the likes of Comet or Currys, for example a Tricity washing machine is almost certainly (with the same spec.) identical internally to the equivelent Zanussi, AEG or Electrolux machine since they all get made in the same place, yet there can be a huge difference in price. You are paying for the name and the styling, nothing more. Of course the manufacturers would argue that there are differences, but when we look up the spares lo and behold, they all use the same part numbers. Now I wonder why that is?

People buy whitegoods largely on the strength of the brand name and the reputation that the appliance has, of course the price does make a difference but customers con't seem to think that there is any difference between a Servis machine sold for under £200 and a Meile at over a £1000 in terms of performance and longevity. Frankly that's like trying to compare a Trabant with a Mercedes E Class! The two are worlds apart in terms of performance and in engineering and it's the engineering and the quality of the components used in construction of the machine that will make all the difference. And the same equation works for the cars as the washers, if you want a machine that will simply do the job, might be unreliable and uneconomical to run then buy the cheap one if however you want something that will perform well for many years with little or no trouble then invest in a decent appliance.

Making an educated choice

Many of the independent dealers are far better placed and educated in the products they sell and will spend time and advise you accordingly on what you need, but as you can see it's more of a minefield than you probably realised and often customers have no idea what they're buying, even if they do know and respect the brand.

Just as you may have read in the press about cars, primarily the German brands, having issues with quality we suffer almost exactly the same syndrom in the whitegoods industry. Whilst you may buy a Mercedes on the strength that it is a quality brand and product with premium service, in some cases the facts are that the product is produced to meet a price point in a cheap labour country and sold under the guise of being a German product. Of course manufacturers are not keen to tell customers that this is the case nor are they keen to tell you that they sell multiple branded appliances that are in fact all the same product essentially with only cosmetic changes.

For example some Bosch machines (normally labelled "Made In The EU) are actually produced in a factory in Spain and are not German at all. Many of the large US fridge freezers are manufactured by Maytag and sold under many brand names including Smeg, De Deitrich and many others.

In short, in most cases the customer has no idea what they are actually buying irrespective of the name on the outside and the price tag on the appliance as there is very little information out there on who actually produces what.

However consider this, most major and many minor manufacturers have a huge range of product to sell and yet there is no way that it can be financially viable for them to have production lines set up to make all those different machines. So, they buy in and badge the ones that they do not specialise in from another manufacturer.

Alternatives and the actual manufacturing costs

The next major shift would appear to be a move towards Chinese sourced appliances as they are really cheap to buy as the production costs in China are extremely low. Many machines from manufacturers such as Haier are being badged up for various brands sold in the UK. Rumour has it within the trade that the actual cost of a dishwasher off the assembly line from them is about £30, yet a main motor is sold for over £100 in the UK, a slight disparity. Washers can be bought off the lines for the same or less in some cases.

This may, on the surface of it, look to be great for the consumer as these appliances are cheap, but you have to ask that for those kinds of costs where's the money for service should the product fail? Is it worth repairing at all? And if it is a "throwaway" product what happens to the waste and who foots the bill for the cost of disposal? Who picks up the tab for the shipping and installation costs of the replacement product?

You see, whilst the cheap appliance may well be a boon and bring the cost of owning a dishwasher or whatever down allowing more people to own one it also makes any repairs not so viable. It also means that the cost to exchange the product is actually greater than that of the product itself! It also drives down the amount of money available for service as it is often calculated on a percentage of all the appliances sold based on the failure rate within twelve months so, for example, if the failure rate is anticipated to be 5% then generally 5% is added to the buy-in price to pay for service. The problem is of course that in developed Western countries the cost of skilled labour to provide service could easily far exceed that calculated cost. In effect the customer gets poor service because there isn't the funding there to provide the service that they expect on the products.

The other side effect of the cheap products has been that many of the particularly smaller brand names or those with a limited market, like Hoover and Hotpoint who really only ever sold in the UK, have been swallowed up by larger companies from overseas. Now these are just brand names and brand names are often sold on as a commodity in the hope that people that had a Hotpoint, Hoover or Servis will recognise the name and buy the product on the strength of it, unknowingly often buying something that they perhaps did not wish to buy.

It is not unusual to hear of customers moving away from say, Indesit due to a bad experience with them and buying a Hotpoint instead, totally unaware that they are actually buying exactly the same product, from exactly the same manufacturer but with a different fascia and badge on the front.

Also, if the machine is made to a price point then buying a machine at circa £200 from one manufacturer is going to be pretty much of the same quality as one with a different name on it sold by another at the same price point.

Clasification in conclusion

To sum it up, it's a minefield! Often customers are buying products with expectations that it is a "quality" brand when in fact the actual machine is not that great and often not even made by the people that the customer thinks it is, some are barely adequate in terms of performance. But so long as customers persist on buying on the strength of poor or, in most cases, no advice at all and solely on the price of the product then manufacturers will continue to cater for the two things that customers look for in kitchen appliances, how good the product looks and how cheap it can be had for.

Ttry looking in the "Topics" section for more or ask for advice in the forums section.

This article was reproduced for kitchensfitted by kind permission of UK Whitegoods

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