[€uroMeinke]

Wht is interesting to me, is that all these "exclusive" brands are ultimately outsourced offshore where competing brands may well be manufactured by the same company.

There was a great essay in a Granta awhile back about the evolution of various manufacturers of Toy trains and how overtime, they were all manufactured in the same Chinese plant where they were just branded and packaged differently.

Now the brand is probably associated with a design team somewhere, but I wonder to what extent that is outsourced as well. I know Target and K-mart have been trying to link their brands to well known designers (e.g. Michael Graves) as a strategy, which I think has been working in thier favor.