Pick up a Brooks Brothers shirt and turn it inside out. Look at the shoulder stitching. If it looks like a rat’s nest of tangled thread done by someone who couldn't give a shit, that's the business model working exactly as designed.

Brooks Brothers was founded in 1818, dressed 40 presidents over the following two centuries, and made the coat Lincoln was wearing the night he was shot. For most of that run the name meant one specific thing: quality American tailoring at a price that reflected it.

Now think about Eddie Bauer. They used to sell gear with a lifetime warranty, the kind where you could wear a jacket for a decade, bring it back when it wore out, and walk out with a new one. People built real loyalty around that promise. In the spring of 2019, Eddie Bauer quietly scrapped the lifetime guarantee and replaced it with a one-year return window. Customers found out the way you'd expect, by trying to use the guarantee in store and getting turned away. Then in February 2026, the operating company filed for bankruptcy and the court filings made it official: all sales final, no returns, no exchanges.

Quick note before we get into it: everything that follows is now tracked on The Brand Ledger, the searchable database of every brand I've covered. More at the end.

The Company

The same company owns both brands. It's called Authentic Brands Group. They're valued at over $20 billion. CEO Jamie Salter founded the company in 2010 with backing from private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners. Revenue went from $1 million in its founding year to $489 million by 2020, according to their own 2021 SEC filing.

The playbook is simple.

Wait for a beloved brand to hit financial trouble. Buy the intellectual property out of bankruptcy: the name, the logo, the trademarks. Strip out whoever made the thing worth buying. That means the designers and the factory workers and the quality control infrastructure, all of it gone. Then license the brand name to third-party companies who actually make and sell everything. ABG collects royalty checks.

Their own S-1 filing said it plainly; they "generally do not design or manufacture the products associated with our brands and therefore have more limited control over such products' quality." That's a direct quote from a company that owns 50+ brands you grew up with, publicly admitting in a federal securities filing that it does not control the quality of the products sold under those names.

They call themselves "brand guardians." Their words, right there in the prospectus, sandwiched between risk disclosures about licensee bankruptcy and quality control failures. What they guard is the trademark. The stitching, the materials, the workers who made the thing worth buying in the first place are all somebody else's problem.

ABG doesn't just own clothing brands, either. They own the licensing rights to the names and likenesses of Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, David Beckham, and Shaquille O'Neal. Shaq licensed his name and likeness to ABG in 2015 and took equity as part of the deal. He has since stated publicly (and ABG's leadership has confirmed) that he is the company's second-largest individual shareholder behind only the founder.

ABG really doesn't need the stores or the licensing deals to survive, which is what makes the whole model bulletproof. When an operating partner goes bankrupt (and they do, with alarming regularity) ABG still owns the brand, and they just find another licensee.

The Body Count

Brooks Brothers got bought out of bankruptcy in 2020 for $325 million by SPARC Group, a joint venture involving ABG and Simon Property Group. They launched a cheap diffusion line called "B by Brooks Brothers" through Macy's. Retail Dive reported that the new line uses polyester and viscose blends where the original used 100% wool. The flagship stores still carry a higher tier, but the name now covers everything from made-in-USA oxfords to polyester at outlet malls.

The logo is identical across both tiers, but the actual garments have almost nothing in common, and unless you know to flip the shirt inside-out and check the stitching yourself, you won't figure out which one you're holding until it falls apart on you.

Eddie Bauer's warranty death was just the visible symptom, but the design rot started before it. Eddie Bauer made gear you could trust in genuinely harsh conditions. Their First Ascent line was designed for mountaineers, their Guide Pro pants were a staple for backcountry hikers, and their down jackets kept people warm through Alberta winters and Minnesota blizzards for 10, 15, 20 years. When something wore out, you brought it back and they replaced it. That relationship is what built the brand, and ABG bought the name and killed the relationship.

A former Eddie Bauer designer described the turning point: the CEO decided to start carrying footwear and bypassed the internal design team entirely. There was no design work and no testing involved because the shoes weren't being designed at all. They went to a Chinese white-label manufacturer, picked synthetic shoes out of a catalog, stamped the Eddie Bauer logo on them, and shipped them to stores. Nobody designed the shoes. Nobody tested them. They picked them out of a catalog.

This is Eddie Bauer's third bankruptcy (174 stores closing and over a billion dollars in debt this round) and the logo is still going to survive it. ABG has already announced plans to relaunch the brand digitally with a "strategy centered on technical product innovation."

Forever 21 was bought out of bankruptcy in 2020 and went bankrupt again in 2025. Lost over $400 million in three years. ABG's own CEO called buying it "probably the biggest mistake I made." All 350 U.S. stores gone.

Champion was acquired from HanesBrands in October 2024 for $1.2 billion. At the time of the sale, Champion's U.S. sales were already tanking, down 23% in Q4 2023 alone. Anyone who wore Champion reverse weave hoodies in the 2010s and remembers them lasting years should pay close attention to what comes out under the name next, because ABG has already announced plans to convert the brand to a licensed model.

Dockers was sold to ABG in February 2026 for $311 million. Levi Strauss used the proceeds to buy back its own stock.

And this is far from a complete list. ABG also owns Volcom, Quiksilver, Billabong, RVCA, Roxy, DC Shoes, and Element, all acquired in a single $1.25 billion Boardriders purchase in 2024. If you’re like me and you grew up skating or surfing in the 90s or 2000s and spent real money on any of these brands because they seemed different from the generic stuff your friends wore, every single one now sits on one company's balance sheet and is subject to the same licensing treatment I've been describing.

Volcom jeans were well-made, Billabong board shorts lasted a decade of salt water and sun, and I've personally seen RVCA tees from 2008 still intact with no holes, no warping, better fabric than almost anything on a rack today.

In December 2024, DC Shoes fired their entire product development team and handed global design for footwear and snowboard boots over to BBC International, a Boca Raton licensing shop whose portfolio is mostly kids' shoes and casual branded footwear for labels like K-Swiss, Champion, and Polo Ralph Lauren. Nothing in their history involves technical snowboard boots, which require an entirely different engineering stack than a pair of skate sneakers. Around the same time, DC cut Travis Rice from their team roster. Rice, arguably the most decorated freeriding snowboarder alive, went to Union, a competitor, and spent the next three years helping them engineer a boot from scratch.

Sports Illustrated

ABG also bought Sports Illustrated for $110 million in 2019. The magazine that defined American sports writing for half a century, handed off to a brand licensing company.

Under ABG's model, the publication was passed to operating partners to run. And in November 2023, Futurism reported that SI was publishing articles attributed to fake authors who didn't exist. The bylines belonged to fabricated people with AI-generated headshot photos you could buy on stock image sites. Faces that were never real, attached to bylines on one of the most storied publications in American media.

SI blamed a licensed content partner called AdVon Commerce and terminated the partnership. The Sports Illustrated Union called the report "horrifying." Most of the editorial staff was eventually cut when Arena Group, the operator, lost its license in January 2024 and all staffers were laid off. ABG relicensed the name to Minute Media.

This is what happens when a brand management company owns a media property. The journalism becomes an expense to be minimized, and if AI-generated slop under fake bylines can fill the page cheaper than paying writers, the model says do it.

The Shein Connection

ABG's retail operating partner for several brands is an entity called Catalyst Brands, formed in January 2025 from the merger of SPARC Group and JCPenney.

The shareholders of Catalyst Brands, per their own press release: Simon Property Group, Brookfield Corporation, ABG, and Shein.

Shein. The ultra-fast-fashion company accused of labor violations, IP theft, and environmental destruction at industrial scale. The company that helped accelerate the death of brick-and-mortar retail for an entire generation of these brands is now part-owner of the entity that operates Brooks Brothers stores. The brand that dressed Abraham Lincoln is partially owned by the company that sells $4 polyester dresses on an app. One of those facts that sounds like it can't possibly be true but is right there in the SEC filings and press releases, verified by Bloomberg, Retail Dive, and every other outlet that covered the merger.

The Pipeline

One of the most common questions people have when they see this pattern is why so many of these brands show up at TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Costco, and outlet malls.

TJX Group, the parent company of TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and Sierra, admits on its own website that "some of our merchandise is manufactured for us." An NBC Washington investigation went further, finding small "TJX" labels hidden inside what appeared to be designer clothing, confirming those items were manufactured specifically for TJX stores through licensing agreements with the brand names on the tags. A retail expert told NBC that the quality and fit you expect from a designer label may not be what you get from a licensed item.

The "retail prices" on their comparison tags are also suspect. TJX settled a class-action lawsuit for $8.5 million in California over its "Compare At" pricing, which plaintiffs called "phantom markdowns". An ABC News reporter walked into a store, found a Michael Kors purse tagged "Compare At $328," checked the price at Macy's and Neiman Marcus, and found it selling for $278 at both. TJX's own website admits the "Compare At" number is just their buying staff's "estimate" of what a comparable item "may have been sold" for somewhere, at some point. That disclaimer is buried at the bottom of their site. The price tags in the store say nothing.

This doesn't mean every item at TJ Maxx is garbage. Some locations carry legitimate past-season goods. But most of the model runs on cheap product made specifically for the store, with a fake 'original price' on the tag.

People who've worked inside these companies describe an even messier picture. One person who worked for an ABG brand licensee described a split system: their company makes high-end product with quality fabrics for specialty retailers, while a completely separate licensee of the exact same brand makes budget product for Costco and Sierra, and there's no way for a shopper to tell from the outside which version they're looking at because both products carry the same brand name, sometimes with slightly different logos, but the quality and construction have nothing in common.

What's maddening about all of this is how invisible it is at the point of purchase. There's nothing on the tag that says "this is a licensed product made by an entirely different company than the one that built this brand's reputation," and unless you've read the specific trade press coverage of the specific licensing deal for the specific brand you're holding, you genuinely cannot tell from the outside which version of the product you're about to buy.

Outlet stores work the same way, and this one is well documented: brands like Banana Republic and J. Crew have dedicated teams whose entire job is designing lower-quality product specifically for the outlet channel. These stores haven't sold overstock in years. They sell cheaper-to-produce versions of the same goods, manufactured for outlet from the start.

It's Not Just ABG

ABG is the biggest player but this is an entire industry now.

WHP Global owns the trademarks for Toys "R" Us, Babies "R" Us, Rag & Bone, Express, Bonobos, Joe's Jeans, Vera Wang, Anne Klein, Isaac Mizrahi, and Lands' End, among others. Bonobos started as a direct-to-consumer brand that people loved for the fit and the quality. Sold to Walmart, quality dipped. Then the brand moved to WHP Global and now it's a name on a website. Joe's Jeans, once known for some of the best premium denim you could buy, has been spotted at Sam's Club for $9.90 a pair.

Marquee Brands owns Martha Stewart, Sur La Table, Emeril Lagasse, America's Test Kitchen, BCBG, Ben Sherman, Dakine, Body Glove, and more. A source who worked inside Marquee described a corporate culture completely disconnected from the actual products: marketing teams fired and replaced twice, licensees cycled through and bankrupted, brands relaunched with new operators, nobody at the top caring about what was being made or who was making it.

The brand licensing industry generated $369.6 billion in global retail sales in 2024, up from $356 billion the year before. Brand licensing is becoming the default way entire product categories work, and if you still assume the name on the label tells you something about the product inside, that assumption is costing you money.

Brands That Still Make Their Own Stuff

This is the part everyone wants, so here's what I can actually verify.

Patagonia is the gold standard. I spoke with a 20-year ski industry veteran who says they're the only brand he's seen maintain quality across his entire career. They repair or replace your items at no cost. They've sent customers links to secondhand listings of their own discontinued products rather than push a new sale. The Patagonia math only pencils out at a company with nobody demanding quarterly returns, which Patagonia became in 2022 when Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership to an environmental trust. There's nobody left to squeeze.

Darn Tough still makes merino wool socks in Vermont with a lifetime warranty they actually honor. No asterisks, no 30-day window, no fine print that voids the promise.

Barbour has been family-owned for five generations since 1894 and still makes its wax jackets by hand at the same factory in South Shields, England. They re-wax and repair over 60,000 jackets a year. Queen Elizabeth reportedly wore the same Beaufort jacket for 25 years and turned down repeated offers to replace it.

Duluth Trading Company has become a go-to Eddie Bauer replacement for a lot of people. Workwear-grade construction at reasonable prices.

Carhartt's workwear line (not the WIP fashion line) is still built to take real abuse. Family-owned since 1889, still headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan.

Solovair for anyone mourning Doc Martens. They're the original factory in Northamptonshire that made Docs before production moved overseas. Same facility, same craft. Different name on the box.

Red Wing has been family-owned for four generations since 1905 and still manufactures its Heritage line in Red Wing, Minnesota. Privately held, no outside investors, two domestic factories. One of the few remaining owner-operated American shoe companies.

Pendleton is a sixth-generation family-owned business that still weaves its wool at the original mills in Pendleton, Oregon and Washougal, Washington, both of which have been running for over a century. The woven wool throws and traditional blankets are still made start to finish in those mills. Most apparel and some bedding lines (quilted blankets, matelassé) are constructed offshore from domestically woven fabric, so check the label before you buy.

The common thread: look for companies that still own their factories, still employ their own designers, and aren't backed by private equity or brand management firms. If you can't figure out who actually makes the product, that's your answer. If the brand shows up at Costco, TJ Maxx, and a flagship store all at the same time, be skeptical. If it went through bankruptcy in the last decade, look up who bought the name before you buy anything with it on the label.

What ABG does is reputation laundering. They take the trust a brand earned over decades of actually making good products and they convert that trust into royalty payments, cashing it out quarter by quarter until there's nothing left. Then they find the next name to strip.

Forever 21 went bankrupt twice under this model, Eddie Bauer three times, and in every case, the logos kept going while the factories closed and the workers lost their jobs and the products turned into garbage.

A $370 billion industry built on the bet that you won't notice.

Forward this to the person in your life who buys this stuff and wonders why it keeps getting worse. That's the single best way to support what I'm doing here.

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And if you've watched a brand you loved decline from the inside, I want to hear from you. Hit reply. Confidential by default. No names used without permission, ever. The best reporting comes from people who were in the room when the corners got cut.

Continue on The Brand Ledger

Every brand named in this essay (ABG, WHP Global, Marquee, and the ones still making their own stuff) is tracked on the Brand Ledger.

→ See ABG's brands on the Ledger

→ Brands to Avoid across every category (the ones actively being extracted)

→ Approved brands — the ones still making their own stuff (Patagonia, Darn Tough, Red Wing, Pendleton, and more)

In 2019, E. Dean Butler visited the Chinese factories where most American eyeglass frames are manufactured. Butler founded LensCrafters in 1983 and built it into the largest optical chain in North America before it was acquired out from under him in 1995. He has no affiliation with the company anymore. He went to look at what the industry had become.

Quality frames, he reported, cost $4 to $8 to produce. Designer-quality frames, the kind that carry a Prada or Chanel label, run about $15. First-quality lenses cost $1.25 each.

Those same frames and lenses sell in the United States for $800.

"It's ridiculous," Butler told the Los Angeles Times. "It's a complete rip-off."

Charles Dahan backed him up. Dahan ran Custom Optical, one of the largest frame suppliers in America, providing 20% of LensCrafters' inventory before the acquisition. In the 1980s and 90s, he said, it cost him $10 to $16 to manufacture quality plastic or metal frames. Lenses ran about $5 a pair. With premium coatings, $15. LensCrafters would sell completed glasses for $99, and that was already well below what independent opticians charged.

Manufacturing costs have gone way down since then.

The markups now exceed 1,000%.

The company behind this is one most people have never heard of. But if you wear glasses or sunglasses, you've almost certainly given them money.

EssilorLuxottica is a Franco-Italian conglomerate headquartered in Paris. €27 billion in annual revenue. Over 18,000 retail stores. 600+ factories and 128 distribution centers across 150 countries. They are the largest eyewear company on the planet by a wide margin.

They own Ray-Ban, Oakley, Persol, Oliver Peoples, Costa Del Mar, and Vogue Eyewear.

They manufacture eyewear under license for Prada, Chanel, Versace, Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, Ralph Lauren, Tiffany, Michael Kors, Coach, Valentino, and Tory Burch. The "Prada glasses" at your optometrist were not designed by Prada. They were not crafted in a Prada atelier. They were made in the same Luxottica factory complex as everything else, on the same production lines, with a licensing sticker applied to the temple. Prada collects a royalty. Luxottica sets the price.

They own LensCrafters. They own Sunglass Hut, with over 3,100 locations worldwide. They own Pearle Vision. They run Target Optical. They own Glasses.com and EyeBuyDirect.

And they own EyeMed Vision Care, the second-largest vision insurance company in the United States, with 43 million members.

One company manufactures the product, owns the brands, controls the retail, and provides the insurance that pays for it. A columnist on 60 Minutes called it "an optical illusion." Fake competition. Dozens of brands on the wall, one company behind all of them.

This didn't happen by accident. It was built, deliberately, over sixty years, by one man.

Leonardo Del Vecchio was born in Milan in 1935. His father, a fruit and vegetable street vendor, died before Leonardo was born. His mother had four other children and couldn't support them all. At seven years old, she placed him in a Catholic orphanage. A letter she wrote to the Martinitt boarding school survives: she asked them to take loving care of her son because she had to work, and "before some misfortune befalls me I prefer his hospitalization also for a more accurate education."

Del Vecchio lived in the orphanage for seven years. The regimen was rigid. Wake at 6am regardless of season. Stand shirtless in January. Eat at exactly 7am. School until night. The orphanage taught the boys, in Del Vecchio's own words, to work tirelessly and fight against laziness.

He left at fourteen to apprentice at a metal factory, making cups and medals. The factory sent him to night school for drawing and engraving. His first contact with eyeglass frames came when he was handed aluminum temples to engrave decorations on. He later said he realized immediately that he was good at it, that his finished work never needed corrections, and that this meant something.

At 25, in 1961, he moved to Agordo, a village in the Dolomite Mountains that was giving away free land to attract businesses. He opened a workshop making small metal parts for eyeglass frames. Fourteen employees. He named the company Luxottica, from "luce" (light) and "ottica" (optics). He built his house next to the factory so he could start his day at 4am.

By 1967 he was selling complete frames under the Luxottica brand. By 1971 he'd stopped contract manufacturing entirely. In 1974 he bought his first distribution company. He wanted vertical integration from the start. Manufacturing wasn't enough. He needed to control how the product reached people.

The inflection point came in 1988, when Luxottica signed its first designer licensing deal with Giorgio Armani. Every fashion house had rejected Del Vecchio before this. Glasses carried a stigma. They were medical devices, not fashion. Armani took the risk.

It worked. And Del Vecchio understood something that would fuel the next thirty years of expansion: if you put a fashion label on a medical device, people will pay twenty times what it costs to make.

The acquisitions accelerated. He listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1990, not Milan, because, as he put it, "if you have to sail, it's better to choose the big sea." He used the listing to fund a buying spree. Vogue Eyewear in 1990. Persol and LensCrafters in 1995 (through a hostile takeover of US Shoe Corporation, a company with a market cap five times Luxottica's). Ray-Ban in 1999. Sunglass Hut in 2001. Oakley in 2007.

By the time Del Vecchio died of pneumonia in 2022 at age 87, he was the second-richest person in Italy. The machine he built keeps running without him.

The Oakley acquisition is the clearest window into how EssilorLuxottica actually operates.

In the early 2000s, Oakley was one of the most valuable eyewear brands in the world. Athletes wore them. The brand carried real cultural weight. They were, for a brief period, a genuine competitor.

Del Vecchio had just purchased Sunglass Hut in 2001. One of his first moves was to demand that all suppliers lower their wholesale prices. Oakley's founder, Jim Jannard, refused.

Luxottica's response was immediate. They pulled every Oakley product from every store they owned. Sunglass Hut, at the time the largest sunglass retail chain on the planet. LensCrafters. Pearle Vision. All of it. Overnight.

Oakley's stock price dropped 33%.

While Oakley hemorrhaged market value, Luxottica returned with an acquisition offer. $2.1 billion. Oakley had no leverage left. They had been locked out of the dominant retail channel in America and couldn't recover their position. The deal closed in 2007.

After the purchase, Luxottica put Oakley products right back on the shelves of the same stores that had just boycotted them. And raised the prices.

One detail that tends to get lost: during the dispute, while Oakley was being strangled out of retail, Luxottica began producing Ray-Ban models that bore a noticeable resemblance to Oakley's signature designs. There was a legal fight. It didn't matter. Luxottica soon owned both brands.

They ran the same playbook on Ray-Ban, just from the other direction.

By the 1990s, Ray-Ban was effectively a dead brand. Bausch & Lomb had turned them into a mass-market commodity. You could buy a pair of Wayfarers at a gas station for $19.

Luxottica bought Ray-Ban from Bausch & Lomb in 1999 for $640 million. Industry analysts said they overpaid. Del Vecchio didn't care. He grabbed a sheet of paper, did the math, and made the offer.

The turnaround was surgical. Luxottica withdrew Ray-Ban from 13,000 retail outlets. They improved the product, increasing the lacquer layers on Wayfarers from 2 to 31 and consolidating manufacturing at a state-of-the-art Italian facility. And they placed the brand in Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, alongside the fashion labels they were already licensing.

Then they methodically ratcheted the price. Aviators started at $79 in 2000. By 2002, $89. By 2009, $129 as they introduced carbon fiber and new lens materials as justification. Today, basic Wayfarers retail for $150 to $200 or more.

Ray-Ban's revenue went from €252 million the year after acquisition to over €2 billion by 2014. An eightfold increase in fifteen years.

The quality improvement was real. But frames that cost a few dollars to manufacture don't become $200 products because you added lacquer. They become $200 products because you control the retail and eliminate every alternative at that price point. The scarcity was manufactured. The exclusivity was engineered. The price was strategic.

Luxottica's Chief Marketing Officer, Stefano Volpetti, described the strategy this way: "We needed to clean the market of many pieces of low-quality, old Ray-Bans and clean up the distribution."

Clean the market. That's one way to describe choking supply to inflate price.

The part of this story that gets the least attention is the insurance angle.

EyeMed Vision Care is a wholly owned subsidiary of EssilorLuxottica. It is the second-largest vision benefits provider in the United States. Approximately 43 million Americans are members. It is accepted at over 30,000 optometrists.

The closed loop works like this:

Your employer buys EyeMed vision coverage as part of your benefits package. Those premiums go to Luxottica.

EyeMed directs you to "in-network" providers. Visit their website. The retailers they list are LensCrafters, Target Optical, Pearle Vision, and Glasses.com. Every single one is owned by Luxottica.

You walk into one of those stores and select frames. Ray-Ban, Oakley, Prada, Coach, Versace. All manufactured by Luxottica.

Luxottica collects the insurance premium. The retail margin. And the manufacturing profit. Three separate revenue streams from the same transaction.

They never disclose the relationship. EyeMed does not tell its 43 million members that it is owned by the same company that owns the stores and the brands. The whole system is presented as if you're choosing between independent options.

The out-of-network situation is even more telling. EyeMed offers minimal to zero reimbursement for glasses purchased independently or online. They would rather cover a $400 visit to LensCrafters than reimburse $20 for glasses bought elsewhere. That makes no sense as cost containment. It makes perfect sense as market-share protection.

Employers and HR departments are, in many cases, paying premiums to Luxottica for the privilege of funneling their employees into Luxottica's retail ecosystem. One industry observer put it bluntly: "In essence, EyeMed is merely an instrument to protect the market share of the Luxottica family of companies, and it provides little to no substantive cost amelioration to consumers, what many would regard as the principal purpose of insurance."

It gets worse. The Better Business Bureau complaints against EyeMed tell a consistent story. Members told by customer service that their frame benefit could be used for frames alone, only to be denied after making a non-refundable purchase. Customers on hold for an hour, transferred multiple times, getting contradictory answers. Claims misattributed between family members on the same plan, taking months to resolve. One BBB complaint documents a member who contacted EyeMed three separate times before purchasing, was explicitly told the benefit applied, made a $578 purchase, and was then informed the benefit didn't cover what she'd been told it would.

Meanwhile, Luxottica has been steadily cutting reimbursements to independent optometrists who accept EyeMed. Some in the industry believe this is deliberate. Lower reimbursements make it less attractive for independent practices to accept EyeMed patients, pushing more of those patients toward Luxottica-owned retail locations. A 2017 analysis in The Hill estimated that the combined Essilor-Luxottica entity would exert influence over 83% of American optometrists through EyeMed's network.

When 60 Minutes confronted the Luxottica CEO about this, asking how vertical integration benefits people, Andrea Guerra's response was revealing:

"Everything is worth what people are ready to pay."

There's more.

In August 2020, hackers breached a web-based appointment scheduling application used by EyeMed and LensCrafters. The personal and protected health information of 829,454 patients was exposed, including names, Social Security numbers, medical diagnoses, treatment information, and credit card numbers.

A month later, in September 2020, a separate Nefilim ransomware attack hit Luxottica's systems, shutting down operations in Italy and China.

In March 2021, yet another breach through a third-party partner exposed the personal information of over 70 million customers. Names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth. The data surfaced on hacking forums in late 2022 and was offered for sale.

The settlement for the 2020 breach that exposed health records, Social Security numbers, and credit card data of 829,000 people? $250,000.

A quarter of a million dollars. For a company with €27 billion in annual revenue.

They also got caught lying about their technology. LensCrafters spent a decade advertising its AccuFit Digital Measurement System as "five times more accurate" than traditional methods, using this claim to upsell premium prescription lens products. The claim was false. A class action resulted in a $39 million settlement approved in September 2024, covering purchases made between 2013 and 2023. Ten years of false advertising about the precision of a tool used to measure people's vision.

And there is an active antitrust class action filed in 2023 in San Francisco federal court, naming EssilorLuxottica and 48 co-defendants, including subsidiaries, manufacturers, and fashion houses, accused of conspiring to inflate eyewear prices by up to 1,000%. The complaint calls EssilorLuxottica the "instigator and primary enforcer" of a price-fixing conspiracy in the American eyewear market. The case is ongoing.

In 2018, Luxottica merged with Essilor, the world's largest prescription lens manufacturer. The deal was valued at $32 billion. It combined the dominant frame maker with the dominant lens maker, adding Essilor's proprietary technologies (Varilux progressive lenses, Crizal anti-reflective coatings, Transitions photochromic lenses) to Luxottica's existing empire of brands, stores, and insurance.

Tim Wu, Columbia law professor and antitrust expert who served in both the Obama and Biden administrations, called Luxottica's profit margins "relatively obscene." On the Essilor merger, he was more direct: "It obviously should have been blocked. That was the byproduct of another era. And we look back at that and like, how did you let that one go?"

His analogy: "Imagine if in the luxury-bag industry, like Hermès and Louis Vuitton, if they were all actually the same company. That's kind of the trick here with Luxottica, is they own all the brands people think are competing brands, like Ray-Ban and Oakley, and they sort of mimic competition."

The FTC approved the merger anyway. No conditions. No remedies. No divestitures.

Ryan McDevitt, professor of economics at Duke University, summarized it simply: "They have full control over prices, and that's just a license to mint money for them."

The machine continues to expand. In July 2024, EssilorLuxottica acquired Supreme, the streetwear brand, from VF Corporation for $1.5 billion, a discount from the $2.1 billion VF paid in 2020. Analysts were baffled. An eyewear company buying a streetwear brand. EssilorLuxottica's stock dropped 4% on the announcement. But the pattern is familiar if you've been paying attention. Supreme had been enshittified by VF Corp, overexposed and losing cultural relevance. Luxottica picked up a degraded brand at a discount. The same playbook they ran on Ray-Ban thirty years ago.

And then there's the Meta partnership. EssilorLuxottica has been building smart glasses with Meta since 2019. They sold 2 million units combined in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, they sold 7 million. They're racing toward production capacity of 10 to 20 million units per year. Smart glasses already account for more than a third of EssilorLuxottica's quarterly revenue growth. Twenty percent of buyers opt for prescription lenses.

The company that monopolized what sits on your face is now building the next computing platform to sit there permanently. They control the form factor, the retail channel, the lens technology, and the insurance. Every layer of the smartphone ecosystem, hardware, distribution, accessories, service plans, has an eyewear parallel that EssilorLuxottica already dominates.

Leonardo Del Vecchio died in 2022. He once said, when he was younger, "You get rich by selling $2 sunglasses for $150 bucks and aggressively running out or buying your competition."

He wasn't wrong. His company now collects €27 billion a year proving it.

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Continue on the Brand Ledger

Every brand in this essay (and every store, and the insurance company) is owned by EssilorLuxottica. The Ledger tracks all of them, plus the alternatives that sit outside the Luxottica ecosystem.

→ See EssilorLuxottica's brands on the Ledger

→ Approved eyewear — the ones outside Luxottica (Warby Parker, Zenni, Moscot, Randolph, and others)

→ What the Ledger is and how it works

In 2005, a Hong Kong conglomerate bought Milwaukee for $626 million and poured money into it. In 2017, an American conglomerate bought Craftsman for $900 million and built a factory that couldn't stamp its own name on a socket.

Same playbook. Opposite results. This is the story of what happened to every tool brand on the shelf.

If you're coming from the r/Tools post, welcome! What you are reading here is an extended version of that post. About half of what follows is new - thank you to the Redditors who DM’ed me to help fill in some of the extra details in this investigation.

The two conglomerates

Techtronic Industries (TTI) is a Hong Kong company founded in 1985. They own Milwaukee, Ryobi, and manufacture Ridgid power tools under license from Emerson Electric. They bought Milwaukee from Atlas Copco in 2005 for about $626 million.

At the time, Milwaukee was a respected but mid-tier brand known mostly for Sawzalls and hole hawgs. TTI also owns the floor care brands Hoover, Dirt Devil, and Oreck, though those haven't gotten the same love.

Stanley Black & Decker (SBD) is the result of Stanley Works merging with Black & Decker in 2010. That merger created a company that already owned DeWalt, and from there they went on a tear. Craftsman from Sears for $900 million. Irwin and Lenox from Newell Brands for $1.95 billion. They absorbed Porter-Cable, Bostitch, MAC Tools, Proto Industrial, and Vidmar.

Over $6 billion in acquisitions since 2002. At one point they owned so many brands in the same category that their own products were cannibalizing each other on the same store shelves.

Both companies bought up everything. What they did next is where the story splits.

TTI: Buy it, invest in it, leave it alone

TTI bought Milwaukee and basically let it run itself. Kept the R&D operation in Brookfield, WI. Kept the engineering team intact. Dumped $206 million into R&D in a single year. More than 4.4% of total sales going straight back into product development, every year.

The results showed up fast. M12 and M18 launched within two years of the acquisition. Then FUEL brushless motors. Then ONE-KEY, the first digital platform for tools and equipment that lets you track inventory, customize torque settings, and lock a tool remotely if it gets stolen. Then PACKOUT modular storage, which turned a plastic box into an ecosystem. Then MX FUEL, pushing cordless into concrete saws and breakers that used to require a gas engine or a generator.

Milwaukee's Brookfield campus went from 190,000 square feet to over 500,000. They opened a $100 million campus in Menomonee Falls. A manufacturing plant in West Bend. Facilities in Greenwood and Grenada, MS. In the last five years alone, Milwaukee has invested $368 million in domestic expansion.

Wisconsin headcount went from around 300 in 2011 to over 2,000. Across the US, Milwaukee now employs over 5,900 people. Globally, the company now has over 10,000 employees and generates roughly $8 billion in revenue on its own.

Their portfolio strategy is clean. Ryobi handles DIY at Home Depot. Milwaukee handles pros. The two brands don't eat each other. They serve different people at different price points with different expectations, and TTI lets each one keep its own identity, its own engineering, its own product roadmap.

TTI did $14.6 billion in revenue last year with $44 million in net debt. The founders still own roughly 24% of the company. Milwaukee grew 11.6%.

SBD: Buy it, merge it, cut it

Stanley Black & Decker took the opposite approach.

The 2010 merger of Stanley Works and Black & Decker created a company that already owned DeWalt. From there they went on an acquisition spree that should have built an empire. Instead it built a bloated holding company drowning in debt and leadership turnover.

They bought so many brands they were competing with themselves on the same store shelves, then starved the weaker ones to feed DeWalt.

The tools division has been a revolving door at the top. After the previous head left, two executives served as acting co-presidents before Chris Nelson was brought in from Carrier Corporation in June 2023. Nelson had zero tool industry background. He'd been running an HVAC division. Before that, McKinsey and Johnson & Johnson.

The CEO who hired him didn't last much longer. Donald Allan Jr. stepped aside in October 2025 after three years in the role, leaving behind a stock price that had dropped roughly 50% from its 2021 peak. Three years, two billion dollars in cost cuts, 7,000 jobs eliminated, and the guy who ordered all of it still couldn't make the numbers work.

The cost-cutting has been relentless. SBD launched a $2 billion "cost reduction and operational simplification" program. Since late 2023, they've cut roughly 7,000 employees globally. Closed plants in South Carolina and Texas. Sold off their aerospace fastener business to Howmet for $1.8 billion in cash. The total workforce dropped from about 48,500 to 43,500 in a single year. Annual filings show $141 million in restructuring charges in 2022 and another $39 million in 2023.

SBD is carrying $6.1 billion in long-term debt.

And then the New Britain closure. In February 2026, SBD announced it was shutting down its manufacturing plant on Myrtle Street in New Britain, CT. 300 jobs gone.

The facility made tape measures. The company said demand for single-sided tape measures was in "structural decline." New Britain is the city where Stanley was literally founded in 1843. Locals call it "Hardware City" because of Stanley. The former mayor's response: "How many times are we going to see this movie?"

Craftsman: A $90 million lesson in failure

Craftsman was never really a manufacturer. Under Sears, they sourced from 203 different vendors across the product line. The biggest was Emerson Electric for power tools, followed by Vermont American and Western Forge for hand tools. Sears had to warranty the items themselves because the vendors wouldn't.

Craftsman was always a name on other people's products. A brand licensing operation with a lifetime guarantee stapled to it.

SBD bought that name from Sears in 2017 for $900 million. Said they were going to "bring back its American manufacturing heritage." A heritage that never existed. They built a $90 million automated factory in Fort Worth, Texas. Was supposed to employ 500 people.

The automation didn't work. Ratchets were coming out of the press misshapen. Sockets went through heat treating without the brand name stamped on them. Metal wasn't getting fully punched out. Retailers couldn't get complete sets, so they canceled orders.

The executive who launched the project left in 2020. Got replaced by four different people in four years. The SEC later hit the company for failing to disclose $1.3 million in executive perks, including private jet use.

They shut the factory down in March 2023. 175 workers at the end. Not 500. The few tool sets that factory actually produced are now collectors' items on eBay. Collectible because of how awful they are. A $90 million factory that ran for about three years and its main legacy is ironically valuable socket sets.

SBD didn't just fail to run a manufacturing company. They failed to run a brand licensing operation. That's supposed to be the easy version.

Craftsman wrenches are made in India now. Their quality perception score dropped from 61 to 55, the biggest decline in the entire tool category.

Porter-Cable: The saddest story in tools

If the Craftsman failure is the most public, Porter-Cable is the most painful.

Porter-Cable was founded in 1906. They invented the portable belt sander. The helical-drive circular saw. The Speedmatic router that professional woodworkers built entire shops around. In 1996, the Smithsonian Institution collected their company history as part of the American manufacturing record. They were that important.

By the early 2000s, Porter-Cable was widely considered the highest quality line of woodworking power tools available in America. When distributors worked trade shows, a significant chunk of their booth time was spent listening to customers talk about the Porter-Cable tools in their garages. How long they'd had them. How they still ran perfectly. The service centers were staffed by people who could recite 14-digit part numbers for bearings off the top of their heads.

Porter-Cable once discontinued the 126 door plane because the tooling to build them had worn out. After an outcry from the contractor community, they retooled the machines and brought the plane back. It was simply the best tool in the world for installing doors. That's the kind of company it was. Professional, passionate, invested.

SBD bought them in 2004. The cheapening of internal components started immediately.

According to a former tool industry representative who spent 30 years in the business, the plan was clear from day one. Cheapen the internals to build more profit margin into each unit. Discontinue large portions of the product line, including iconic legacy tools the brand was built on. The service centers closed within roughly six months of the acquisition.

The reps who built their careers on the Porter-Cable name were fired shortly after. One of the best in the industry saw what was happening early, left for Metabo, and stayed there for almost two decades. That tells you the caliber of people SBD pushed out the door.

Router line discontinued. Social media went dark for years. No new product development. You can still find some Porter-Cable stuff at Tractor Supply, but the brand is functionally dead.

A 118-year-old company. Important enough for the Smithsonian to preserve. Reduced to clearance bin filler.

Metabo: What consolidation looks like at the human level

Metabo was a family-owned German company. They made some of the best angle grinders and metalworking tools on the market. SBD had courted them for years because Metabo was their biggest competition in the metal grinding channel. Metabo always said no. They knew SBD would gut them.

Eventually Metabo was sold to a private equity firm. That firm sold them to KKR, which had also acquired the tool division from Hitachi. KKR got everything from Hitachi except the brand name, with one year to rebrand.

Globally, the tools were rebranded as HiKoki. In the US, they went with Metabo HPT. The CEO told the sales force that HiKoki tested poorly in American focus groups and Metabo had strong US name recognition. On paper this made sense. In practice it was bizarre. Hitachi was a nail gun company in the US. The metalworking channel had zero association with the name "Metabo HPT." Nobody knew what it was.

Key people started leaving. The remaining sales force was told repeatedly that Metabo and Metabo HPT would remain independent companies. Nothing to worry about.

Around September 2022, a companywide sales meeting was called.

At that meeting, the merger was announced. Every independent manufacturer's rep in the country was fired. 80 salespeople. Some of them had spent their entire careers building the Metabo brand in America. Several of those agencies were generational. Fathers and grandfathers had built businesses on their Metabo relationship going back to when the brand first entered the US market.

They were replaced by 16 Hitachi direct sales people who already had full-time jobs selling nails and nail guns. Zero metalworking expertise. Zero channel relationships. They just needed warm bodies with existing paychecks.

Several rep agencies went out of business entirely. Others never recovered. One former managing partner of a rep agency, who'd spent 30 years in the tool industry, walked away from his company with nothing after two years of trying to rebuild. The decades of consolidation and the destructive influence of private equity in the industry were a major part of why he left.

This is what the spreadsheet doesn't show. The financial filings talk about "restructuring charges" and "workforce optimization." In reality it's 80 people in a conference room finding out their careers are over because a private equity firm broke a promise.

The Milwaukee counterpoint

I'd be full of shit if I wrote all of this and pretended TTI was perfect.

TTI did the acquisition strategy right. They invested where SBD cut. The results speak for themselves in the revenue numbers and the market share trajectory. But Milwaukee isn't flawless.

Multiple tradespeople and repair technicians report that newer Milwaukee tools have switched to bottom-of-the-barrel bearings. The kind you'd expect to find in a store-brand budget tool. Spare parts for repair are badly priced, frequently unavailable, or only sold in assemblies that include a bunch of components you don't need. One repair technician estimates he can only economically fix a Milwaukee tool about 30-40% of the time. For Makita, that number is 80-90%.

The Surge hydraulic driver line had QC issues that Milwaukee never publicly acknowledged. Tools with the same part number shipped with measurably different performance. That's the kind of thing that erodes trust with the exact professionals who built the brand's reputation in the first place.

None of this erases the contrast between TTI and SBD. But growth brings its own pressures. Time will tell whether TTI starts making the same cost-cutting mistakes once Milwaukee's growth rate slows down. Every company eventually faces the temptation to harvest what it built. The ones that resist it are the ones that last.

The ones that never sold

A few companies watched all of this happen and said no.

Klein has been family-owned since 1857. Sixth generation, still private. Their core lineman's pliers remain the industry standard. Though it's worth noting that they've started slapping the Klein name on a wider range of white-label products, and the quality on some of those newer items doesn't match the reputation. The legacy tools are still excellent. The expansion products are a gamble.

Makita has been independent since 1915. They're owned by Makita. They make Makita. No parent company, no conglomerate, no PE firm in the background. Multiple tradespeople swear by their ergonomics, vibration resistance, and longevity. Their batteries are overpriced and the US market gets a fraction of the product line that Japan gets, which is its own frustration. But nobody's gutting them from the inside.

Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.

Channellock is still owned and operated by the founder's descendants. US-made hand tools. They've quietly stayed private while everyone around them got acquired.

Hilti is owned by a family trust and still operates as a family company. Their customer service is legendary. One commenter shared that he bought bolts from them once in 2010 and they still have a dedicated service rep who calls him twice a year. He buys bolts out of guilt now.

Bosch is a private company owned by the Robert Bosch Foundation. Their power tools division is basically a rounding error in their overall business. They make everything from fuel injection systems to dishwashers to automotive sensors. Different beast entirely.

These companies prove the same thing from the opposite direction. You don't have to get acquired. You don't have to take the PE money. You can just keep making good products and telling everyone else to go to hell. It's harder, and it's slower, and the growth chart won't impress a Wall Street analyst. But the tools last. And the brand means something 50 years from now instead of ending up in a clearance bin.

The pattern

This isn't a tools story.

This is what happens in every industry once the conglomerates and private equity firms show up. Acquire the brand. Consolidate the operations. Cut costs. Extract value. Move to the next one.

The names change. The industries change. The strategy doesn’t.

I wrote about the same pattern in backpacks a couple weeks ago. VF Corporation, a former lingerie company, owns JanSport, The North Face, Eastpak, Kipling, and Eagle Creek. Same playbook. Different aisle.

Eyewear is next. One Italian company owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, and the insurance you use to pay for your glasses. They own the brands, the retail stores, and the payment pipeline. That one is going to be fun.

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Continue on the Brand Ledger

Every brand in this essay is tracked on the Brand Ledger. The full TTI portfolio, the full SBD portfolio, and the ones that never sold.

→ See TTI's tool brands on the Ledger (Milwaukee, Ryobi, Ridgid)

→ See SBD's tool brands on the Ledger (Craftsman, DeWalt, Porter-Cable, and the rest)

→ Approved tool brands — the ones still worth buying

VF Corporation started as Vanity Fair Mills. Bras and underwear. They paid $762 million for a company called Blue Bell and picked up JanSport in the deal. That acquisition made them the largest publicly traded clothing company in the world.

Then they went shopping.

In 2000, they bought The North Face. Same year, they bought Eastpak. In 2004, Kipling. In 2007, Eagle Creek. By the time they were done, VF Corporation controlled an estimated 55% of the US backpack market.

More than half. One company.

Every time you stood in a store in the 2010s and compared a JanSport to a North Face to an Eastpak, you were comparing three labels owned by the same parent corporation. Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.

Competition is what kept these brands honest when they were independent. If JanSport built a shitty bag in 1985, you walked across the aisle and bought an Eastpak instead. That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above: hit the margin target.

The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.

What they changed

Denier count is the most measurable indicator of fabric durability. It measures fiber thickness. A bag made with 1000-denier Cordura nylon can survive years of daily use. Drop that to 600-denier polyester and you have a bag that looks identical on the shelf and lasts half as long.

Denier counts dropped across VF Corp's backpack lines.

YKK makes the best zippers on earth. They're Japanese, they cost more per unit, and brands that care about longevity use them because a zipper failure kills a bag faster than fabric wear. On VF Corp's lower-tier models, YKK hardware got swapped for generic alternatives. A few cents saved per unit across millions of bags.

Stitching density went down. More stitches per inch means stronger seams. Fewer stitches means faster production. When you're running millions of units through factories in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, shaving seconds off each seam saves serious money. It also creates failure points at every spot where the bag takes stress. Strap junctions. Zipper terminations. The bottom panel.

None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.

Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look.

All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better.

The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.

Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.

The warranty is doing the same thing

JanSport still advertises a lifetime warranty. It sounds like a company that stands behind its product.

Go try to use it.

You ship the bag back at your own expense. That runs $12 to $25 depending on size and where you live. You wait three to six weeks. That's the current turnaround per JanSport's own warranty page. Then they evaluate the damage.

"Normal wear and tear" isn't covered. Only "defects in materials and workmanship." Think about what that means for a bag engineered to last two years. When it starts falling apart at eighteen months, that failure can be classified as the product reaching its expected lifetime, not as a defect. The warranty language is structurally designed to exclude the exact type of failure the product is now built to have.

People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.

The warranty used to be legendary. JanSport used to be the brand people cited when they talked about companies that actually stood behind their stuff. That reputation still exists in people's memories. The warranty now runs on that leftover trust.

One person told me they called about getting a zipper replaced on a JanSport from the late 90s. They were told it was normal wear and tear. They tried tailors, got quoted $50 to $100 for a new zipper. They looked at buying a new JanSport and saw how far the quality had fallen. They ended up buying a used backpack at a thrift store for four dollars.

Ten to twenty used bags for the price of one new one that'll fall apart. That's where we're at.

The math that makes this intentional

Price of a bag divided by years it actually lasts. That's your cost per year.

A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. Add the shipping cost when you try the warranty. Add the replacement cost when the claim gets denied. Add your time.

A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper. At fifteen years, which the well-built ones consistently do, you're at $13 per year.

The "expensive" bag costs less. But VF Corp doesn't want you to do this math, because the $35 bag creates a repeat customer every eighteen months. The $200 bag creates one transaction and zero follow-ups. From a shareholder's perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product.

That's the business model. Repeat failure, repeat purchase, repeat revenue. The quality decline isn't a side effect. It's the strategy.

And then they tried to sell the whole thing

In 2021, VF Corp sold Eagle Creek to a former employee who basically rescued the brand from being shut down.

By 2023, VF Corp announced it was exploring "strategic alternatives" for its entire remaining backpack division. JanSport. Eastpak. Kipling. All of them potentially up for sale because they weren't generating enough profit.

The brands your parents trusted went from independent companies to conglomerate assets to margin optimization targets to potential fire-sale candidates. All in under forty years.

And something worth knowing: VF Corporation sold its lingerie business (the one it was literally founded on) back in 2007. Vanity Fair intimates went to Fruit of the Loom. The company shed the thing it actually knew how to make so it could focus on extracting value from the brands it bought. They didn't build any of these outdoor brands. They acquired them, optimized them, and when the optimization stopped producing returns, started looking for the exit.

This is the pattern. Acquisition. Cost optimization. Quality decline. Warranty narrowing. Brand equity extraction. And eventually, divestiture.

It happened to your backpack. The same playbook is running right now on your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of.

I'll be writing about those next.

Continue on the Brand Ledger

The five VF Corp backpack brands covered in this essay are all tracked on the Brand Ledger, alongside every brand named in every Worse on Purpose investigation. It's the living database of who owns what.

→ See VF Corporation's brands on the Ledger

→ Browse Approved brands in Bags & Packs (the ones still worth buying)

→ What the Ledger is and how it works