My Schiller Tuba arrived 2 months ago in its original packaging with a JinBao Tuba model number on the box
The comment above in another thread got me thinking - Why are most of the tubas from China being re-badged and not sold under their manufacturers name? Do the dealers want to hide from the buyer the Chinese origin? In some cases that seems the situation, which seems very bad business practice. It is not like Chinese made is anything to be concerned - many goods now come from that part of the world - in fact likely the computer you are reading this is Chinese - my very good Samsung laptop is!
This re-badging seems to have been prevalent in the past with Meinl-Weston and B&S tubas being sold under various other names, but no longer happens now these companies have a high-quality brand reputation. I wonder if it will also eventually disappear for Chinese made tubas? JinBao appears to quickly be building a good reputation for the quality of its products going by the reviews on TubeNet.
Last edited by Wyvern on Sat Apr 02, 2011 1:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
As someone who works in the music industry, I won't get into too much detail about why companies re-badge other people's instruments in China. Part of this is that many of these companies that build instruments in China don't have the same sort of manufacturing capacity that we as customers expect of instruments, so these "re-branded" tubas are from several different manufacturing plants making the same thing. Think about it like Coke or Pepsi. 1 Pepsi plant can't meet the demand of all people who drink soda, so Pepsi has their soda made in many different plants to meet demand.
Hi-
This is nothing new. In the 19th Century, the famed NYC instrument maker John Stratton had instruments made by his company(s)--both here in the States and overseas, labeled 'Dodworth, O.(Oscar) Coon, William Hall These were businesses/music stores, and as long as Stratton sold the instruments, he would put the stores names on the horn---similar to what is being done today with the Chinese with laser engraving. A sale is a sale--whether it has the maker's name or the buyer's name on it--business is business.
The standard TN term for rebadging appears being stenciling.
There are marketing reasons:
Stores want carrying a house brand. Holton wanted their salesmen traveling the the school band market being able to present a full line of relevant models, so they had Yamaha make, what they didn’t make themselves at the given point of time. One sample was the rebadged YBB-321 BBb bass.
There are circumventions of own contracts about exclusive national distribution. The B&S made Schmidt instruments were sold by a different company than the one officially distributing B&S in the US. I. K. Gottfried used to be the exclusive seller of Hoyer horns in Denmark. When Copenhagen Brass Centre opened in 1984 they wanted Hoyer horns in their assortment, so they had at least one 5 valve single Bb horn engraved B&S. That horn was very good, but nobody wanted it with that engraving. I got it for a fair price, and it is not for sale.
Boosey & Hawkes never made rotary valves (at least not after WWII). They bought their trombone valves from Markneukirchen even for the Sovereign line (until the Hagmann valve was introduced). When the British piston horns went out of fashion, the B&H rotary horns were made by Czech Lidl or by Hoyer/B&S (under the Schneider brand). B&H for many years had their discount line, LaFleuer, made by Czech makers.
John Grey of London hardly ever made the instruments carrying their store name. My JG soprano trombone has ‘Made at the French factory’ under the company name engraving. JG had their French horns made in Italy.
It's for entirely commercial reasons. The reason partly lies in major retail brands (which may or may not represent actual factories) wanting to fill our their line, but I suspect it's mostly a way for the major manufacturers to sell more instruments without competing against themselves. If TA-Musik wants to build the B&S brand to maintain an air of exclusivity to support a higher price, they might still offer a stencil brand through a different supplier at a lower price just to bolster their volume. For example, TA's subsidiary VMI sells the B&S brand at a high price point, the VMI brand at a lower price point, and then a range of stencil brands (a recent example is F. Schmidt) at a budget price point. Thus, a VMI 3301 is basically identical to a B&S PT-2P, and to an F. Schmidt 3301. But the PT-2P is likely to attract a much higher price than the F. Schmidt. They are making sure that they extract the value they can from their strong B&S label before selling at a lower price point using labels that do not attract as high a price.
They might actually change the features slightly to support a difference, but in many cases they don't even attempt to do that much.
In the case of Chinese instruments, it's all about branding. Unsophisticated western buyers (and that's most buyers) will be more likely to buy an instrument with a traditional western brand rather than one with a name that is a mere transliteration of Chinese characters.
Also, each importer wants to build a brand that will give the impression that they add something to the base model that other importers do not have. The Tuba Exchange, Custom Music, and Orpheus provide examples. Now it's being done by ebay sellers. And it's not impossible that these importers do specify some differences in their products, in the way that Sears has things built for their brand according to their own specifications.
Then, there are marketing arrangements and exclusivity agreements. Custom Music was the exclusive importer of B&S Parantucci, so other importers were given a different brand to avoid violating that exclusivity agreement. But the exclusivity agreement was interesting to the manufacturer in the first place as a means of building the brand.
Remember that price is only loosely related to cost, in that it has to be higher than cost. Pricing is determined by the market, and the market works on perceptions as much as reality. Branding is a way to establish perceptions. Whether those perceptions are accurate sometimes takes a while to sort out, but eventually it does.
I don't think it was Asahi Optical Company's idea to adopt the brand "Pentax". I suspect that was suggested by their American supplier, which at the time was Honeywell. Eventually, and long after they no longer needed Honeywell as an importer, the brand became all-important, and the company is now named "Pentax Imaging Corporation". The Jin-Bao factory may always be called Jin-Bao, but I bet they will eventually settle on brands that have more western-sounding names, since that's their market.
Hi!
It's easier to justify markups as much as 400% if you deceive folks about the origins of your product(s). There are a few folks(even a TubeNet sponsor or two.) who go out of their way to let folks know that their stencils are of Chinese origin, but the majority are like Laabs, shamelessly bragging about "German Engineering", and "American Heritage"(how clones of Bessons can be German engineered AND have an American pedigree escapes me), while jacking prices as high as the market can bear! To be fair, I will mention that Laabs is marking their JinBao's up LESS than other sellers, though some would argue that the discount comes at the expense of customer service! Now that JinBao has been producing better products (thanks to MM and others), especially the 186 CC, and 1291 BBb clones, I would think we'll be seeing more of these axes with the JinBao stencil, and at lower markups too!
bloke wrote:I've sold some JinBao instruments...
...but I have them build mine to MY specs, and have SECRET ACOUSTICAL DESIGNS which NO ONE ELSE receives with their Jinbao instruments.
That's why my Jinbao instruments are nameplated: MOUNTOLYMPUS
Or, as the stencil reads "big old guys who killed some slightly more monstrous guys to get ahead but then got offed themselves; or home of such, and who wants to live in a house where hundreds of murders have occurred?"
