Today I learned…
Wouldn’t they be an importer?
The American branch of Honda is an American company arranging to sell & transport American soyabeans to other countries. Maybe to Japan, but to other countries too.
Looks like exporting to me.
Now if they can only perfect the (once failed) soybean car bodies they can go from field to fender without exporting/importing at all.
I just learned from this weekend’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, that the online mortgage company Rate.com also sells athleisure wear under the RateFit brand.
Porche
That is a link to a YouTube video in which the guys from Top Gear discuss the Porsche branded tobacco pipes they purchased from the Porsche brand store (though I can’t find tobacco pipes at the Porsche brand store now). Pretty much all such brands sell crap like this with their name or logo on them but that doesn’t mean they’re really known for those products. (For one thing, the products come from other companies that specialize in branded gear.)
That’s true, a friend of mine once gave me a Harley-Davidson fountain pen for my birthday. It was crap and lasted only for a few months.
I suppose I’m putting the defibrillator on a nearly dead post here, but I think it’s important to maybe make a distinction betwen say… Yamaha making motorcycles and pianos, and situations where a huge conglomerate owns multiple smaller companies making disparate products.
For example, at at point in the 1980s, Ralston Purina, of dog and animal food fame, owned Eveready Batteries. That’s not the same thing as saying “Purina made batteries”, because there was almost certainly a Purina division that made animal feed and a wholly owned subsidiary that made batteries, and the two probably had very little interaction, except in the boardroom and balance sheet.
There was a time when Boeing built light rail vehicles. Granted, Boeing probably wasn’t “known” for making them, unless you happened to live in San Francisco when Muni Metro was using Boeing LRVs – I’m told they had a reputation for being rather unreliable.
Dangit, just yesterday, I thought of an example for this thread, but then dismissed it, since the thread was dormant by now. Danged if I can remember what it was now.
Isn’t that subtle?
A poster known for selling enlightenment is also selling confusion? 
Except that it isn’t just a product with an advert for Porche stamped on it, it’s a pipe designed by Porche. And apparently a high quality one.
Tbe Porsche Design company designs all sorts of fancy stuff for people who “live the Porsche lifestyle.”
Here’s another Porsche Design product. Each condo has a enclosed garage up in the tower adjacent to your living space. A car elevator brings your car from street level to your personal garage. Even on the 20th floor
It seems like there must have been a trend of car companies buying appliance companies in the 1950s and 60s, because Nash owned Kelvinator appliances for a while, too. So we can add them to the list of companies that made both cars and fridges. And maybe AMC post-merger as well?
Crosley went the other direction. They started as an appliance company, then they made cars from 1939 - 1952. Just from a cursory Google search you can still buy a Crosley fridge today, although I’m not sure if the actual company is still around, or just the brand.
Some of it was probably that computers looked like a threat to the copier side of the house. It’s hard to sell “here’s this new device that will eliminate the need for so much paper” to a company that makes its living on duplicating paper (even though in retrospect, a) computers didn’t eliminate the need for duplication, and b) computers would become a money-maker that would dwarf the duplication industry).
If GM’s research lab invented teleportation there would likely be resistance to deploying the tech, for similar reasons, because “let’s deploy a new technology that will decrease the number of cars bought” just sounds wrong to an executive who sells cars.
There are multiple examples of companies that didn’t pursue new opportunities in part because their existing businesses were threatened. An engineer at Eastman Kodak, for instance, invented the digital camera.
One might argue, of course, that those are exactly the products that a business should pursue.
True - but it requires not just thinking about a different future, but also undoing the entire reward structure that has put current company high-ups in their positions (“The Innovator’s Dilemma” talks about a number of examples of companies that were at the top of their industries and fumbled a seemingly minor market change because of a change in the type of value that customers were looking for)
You may recall that during Covid, Ford and 3M teamed up in an emergency program to make respirators. Ford used fans from the F-150 and DeWalt tool batteries for backup, assembling the final product at Ford factories.
Back in 1920 Ford also found a way to process sawdust waste into briquets and marketed the result under the name Kingsford Charcoal.