Dewalt is owned by
Stanley Back and Decker. Dewalt originally produced Radial Arm Saws. After Black and Decker bought the company they discontinued the Radial Arm Saws and started reselling their black and Decker Professional tools under the Dewalt name. Essentially they bought the brand for the name. Black and Decker did the Same with Elu, the German company that invented the plunge router. Stanley tools, which is now part of Black and Decker, has been operating under some of the same principals. Stanley actually hired a firm that specializes in Branding to see what they could put their name on. The firm,
http://www.beanstalk.com/. There's a New York Times article that mentions it. The articles title,
Can a Dead Brand Live Again?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/magazine/18rebranding-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
"Stanley hired Beanstalk about nine years ago. Stanley conducted “consumer permission research” to try to determine where the Stanley brand could go. “I remember looking through the focus-group tests, and there was a guy who absolutely swore that he had a Stanley ladder in his garage.” Stone paused. “Stanley never made ladders.” This is an excellent example of what “brand equity” really means in the marketplace."
"In contrast to the fanatical-devotion theory, part of the point of most branding is very specifically to circumvent conscious thought."
"We’ve all seen the Stanley name, for instance. And by and large, we trust it. We have a general idea of Stanley that fits into our hardware-store purchase heuristics. But there is a great deal of imperfection and vagueness in these thought processes, and that is good news for a licensor. It suggests that there’s potential — or “permission” — for the Stanley name to migrate onto new products."
"What Beanstalk did not do when it took on Stanley as a client was recommend investing in a ladder-production facility and hiring a bunch of workers, plus a sales force to blitz potential retail channels. Stanley Works, as a company, has actually been moving in the opposite direction, closing factories and outsourcing it's manufacturing since the 1980s. Instead, Beanstalk worked out a licensing deal with Werner, which was already the biggest maker and distributor of ladders in the country. “They needed another brand because they couldn’t expand the Werner brand anymore,” Stone said. So Werner started making and selling ladders with the Stanley name on them. This gave Werner a way to get more shelf space, reach more consumers and make more sales. What it gave Stanley was its name on a new product and a licensing fee. Beanstalk has worked out many such deals, hooking up the Stanley brand with manufacturers of work gloves and boots, power generators and a variety of other things that Stanley never made (and does not make now)."
This is a list of brands Beanstalk has found "new products" for.
http://www.beanstalk.com/brands/our-clients/
The list includes Stanley Tools, Black and Decker, Dewalt, Harley Davidson, Jack Daniels, Southern Comfort, and Paris Hilton.
If you ever wonder why unusual products turn up from a brand you might not expect them from, this may be the reason.
