16/04/2026
The State of Brands
Back when I was a wee lad, growing up in the ’90s, I remember going to our local supermarkets with Mum for the weekly groceries. We had a Flemmings and a Payless in those days, over time, morphing into Woolworths and Coles. Baked beans on toast was a staple in our household for breakfast, and I remember we’d always have Heinz baked beans in our pantry. Mum and Dad always had a can of International Roast, and I always had my Milo or Quik. However, when times were tough, or they just weren’t too worried about the quality, you’d find that familiar red circle with HOME BRAND right in the middle. If you shopped at Coles, it was Savings, or potentially even Black & Gold if you had an independent. You knew what you were buying when you were buying it. The products weren’t necessarily bad, but you could mostly tell they weren’t ‘as good’ as the name brands (cola is a great example of this). They were good times, simpler times.
And what simple times they were. Three simple brands offering a simple range of budget products with simple expectations: not great, but not too bad either. Today, between the two major chains, the number of individual house-brand sits somewhere in the area of 70–100, often with overlapping products within the same category. Not to mention each store has between 10–15 independent brands that have signed exclusive deals with them. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but you’re probably thinking to yourself, “I don’t think I’ve seen that many house-brand products.” Well, as William Shakespeare wrote, “What’s in a name?”
When is a house-brand a house-brand? Gone are the days when you could walk into a supermarket and get your Homebrand 'this' and your No Frills 'that' and know exactly what you were getting. Today, supermarkets employ what they call “phantom” or “secret” brands, brands designed to look like an established reputable name, but in reality, is either entirely owned by, or under exclusive contract with, the store. They still keep the old store-labelled house-brand products, often running them directly alongside a ‘phantom brand’. Estimates suggest that between 35% and 40% of supermarket sales come from house-brand products.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with hardware. Well, big-box hardware stores employ the same tactics. If you go to a big-box, you’re probably going to see shelves dominated by recurring brands that you’re unlikely to see anywhere else, with a scattering of recognised brands mixed in. You’ll probably see a large selection of cheap, grey power tools and others in hard-to-miss colours, both with limited after-sale parts or support. There’ll be a few name-brand drill bits alongside a much more comprehensive display of cheaper ones, again, that you can’t get anywhere else. With the house-brand market expected to grow by 4.8% each year, it’s never been harder to tell what you’re actually paying for. It’s also never been easier for big chains to offer price matching when it’s impossible to find the same products anywhere else.
At Toodyay Hardware and Farm, we’re not big enough to buy our own brand of hammers and screwdrivers in bulk from a factory in China. We don’t have the power to convince our suppliers to create a cheap range of products just for us, and we certainly don’t have the ability to demand exclusive rights. No, we just sell quality products made by established names at the lowest prices we can. Can we match the big-box hardware stores on price all the time? No. But we can get as close as possible without making a loss. What we can do is guarantee that when you purchase something from us, you’re getting a quality product backed by proven, established names, not sneaky house-brand products in disguise.
