Our website contains a collection of articles on popular brand names from the past. Most have ultimately failed or sold out to new owners. Some still are in use or have been resurrected after a period of dormancy. Articles about brands still in use mainly focus on those that last a long time. Many posts about surviving brands are about family-owned businesses.
What may be different on our site is that each article contains several searchable attributes – or tags – concerning that brand. The reader may search for many combinations of attributes from this list. For example, you can search for brands of automobiles made within a certain distance from Detroit, beginning after 1905, but not after 1935 under that name. When possible, we identify the owner, predecessor, or successor of this brand name. For brand names still in use, we arbitrarily display the year 2099 for when they stopped being used.
Brand names fit in industry categories. We use the North American Standard Industry Classification codes – or NAICS codes – in identifying each brand. Not every NAICS code appears on our site. We utilize only those that yield memorable brand names. Each article will list the closest NAICS code that we can determine to fit the product or service represented by each brand. We use the 6-digit code that is second drill down form more general classifications. If you are interested in seeing the broader classifications, refer to The NAICS Association website containing the overall subdivided list. In addition to using categories from the United States, we intend to write about past brands from all over the world.
Sources of Information
We write our articles on brand names based on public information available on the internet, including results from search engines, Wikipedia, and GPT-3.5, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. These form the basis for such articles, but they are fact-checked, edited, and also may include original material from the author.
We support Past Brands with ads that are often (hopefully) relevant to the article’s subject. We also may provide affiliate links to products or services available today that are similar to or capture the spirit of the past brand in the article.
Help Us to Improve and Grow
Past Brands wants your feedback. If you know of a brand that needs to be discussed, contact us.
Think we got something wrong, contact us.
If you want to suggest a brand that is currently available and offers a present-day alternative to a discontinued brand, contact us.
Do you feel the content of our site violates the intellectual property rights of some third party? Contact us and we will fix it.
Lastly, if you like the concept that we are building here, and you want to help in some way – writing, editing, research, etc. – contact us. Right now, a single person is building Past Brands. We hope to have thousands of articles as soon as possible!