This will sound familiar: You have a beloved tool/pair of walking boots/kitchen appliance/etc .that you’ve owned since forever. It’s well-made, built to last, but then it breaks or eventually wears out. You replace it with the same model from the same brand, but something’s off. It looks the same, but this time it breaks down after only a year.

No, it’s not you. These products have all been designed to be worse. Silver lining: somebody is keeping an eye on them. 

Brand collapse

Worse on Purpose is a website dedicated to watching the decline of once-great brands. Its Brand Ledger covers everything from tools, appliances, and kitchenware, to bags and packs, sporting goods, and audio gear. A brand will be either approved, on the watchlist, or marked as a “former great.” If a brand has really gone to the dogs, and is being run into the ground by beancounters to extract every last drop of brand value, it is marked as “avoid.” 

Some things were built to last. Photo Charlie Sorrel

Let’s look at some examples of good brands gone bad. Black + Decker, for example, is on the “avoid” list. Why? Back in 2010, Black + Decker merged with Stanley (currently on the watch list). This new company already owned DeWalt, and bought out Craftsman, Bostitch, Irwin, Porter-Cable (all marked as “avoid”), and lots more. This meant that many tools you see open the shelves are from the same company, competing with themselves. They fired thousands of employees, closed plants, and consolidated a lot of what was left over. The result is a portfolio of brands that are being, says Worse on Purpose’s Keyana Sapp, starved to feed the prize brand, DeWalt. 

How about kitchenware? Pyrex used to make borosilicate cookware so legendary that “Pyrex” came to describe all heatproof glass cookware. Now the US company makes tempered soda-lime glass. “Soda-lime glass” is just the name for the regular glass used for windows, bottles, and jars. This type of glass is significantly less safe. Soda-lime glass, Worse on Purpose explains, is

a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55°C of headroom against 183°C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate.

CorningWare has suffered a similar fate. Today it makes mostly glazed stoneware, which cannot be used on a flame. 

Mr. Mixer tears down the old and new Kitchenaid mixer designs and discovers bad news

Tupperware, another household name which became a generic term, is also on the Avoid list. It filed for bankruptcy in 2024, and ended up in the hands of a firm “best known for strip-mining newspapers.” All US-based production ceased.

Worse on Purpose

You can guess why this is happening. Trusted brands are worth a lot of money, marketing and reputation-wise, but making and supporting such high-quality products is expensive, and hard work. It’s much easier for some kind of money company to buy the brand, gut the company or any other valuable assets, and slap the name onto cheap knockoffs instead.

Or, you could keep the company running, but make everything just a little bit worse to save money. That’s what will happen if you buy an Eastpak bag, or Jansport. Or North Face or Eagle Creek. The same company owns all those brands, and they all got worse since being taken over. Denier counts on the Cordura nylon went down, and the YKK zippers were swapped for generic units on the lower-end bags. The trick here was to keep up the quality at the top end, while gutting the cheaper models.

And the real rub is that you have very little choice. If your EastPak backpack or your Stanley tools only last half as long, you can’t just switch brands, because it’s likely that all the apparent alternatives are actually owned by the same company. 

What can you do?

The game is stacked against us, the buyers, but we do have some options. One is to keep a close eye on the Worse on Purpose site, and sign up for email alerts for any brands you use. For instance, I like Keene sandals for hiking and cycling, because one pair lasts me more than a decade. Keene is currently on the watchlist after moving to a new factory, but the ownership remains the same, so I have hopes for my next pair of sandals in 10 years. Otherwise, I will be using Worse on Purpose’s guides to choose a brand that still cares about quality.

Also check out communities like r/BuyItForLife on Reddit, where people discuss stuff that is built to last. 

Another great option is to buy used. I went through several Dymo label embossers before realizing that the current lineup is utter junk. They jam, the handle flexes so much when you print a letter that it feels like it’s about to break, which it does, sooner rather than later. I ended up buying a vintage metal Dymo from my local classifieds, which even came with several boxes of new old stock tape, tape which actually stays stuck.

Chayton’s old Craftsman calipers will probably last forever.

Another advantage of using vintage gear is that it is often easier to repair. The case may be screwed or bolted together instead of glued. More parts will be metal, instead of cheap plastic. And you may be able to find service manuals online. iFixit e-waste-avoidance enthusiast Chayton Ritter recently fixed up his vintage Craftsman calipers (a company that’s now hit the “Avoid” list), and of course photographed the disassembled unit. As you can see, it was built to last.

As this kind of nonsense gets more prevalent, it only emphasizes the importance of the Right to Repair. Now, repairing a backpack doesn’t require any special legislation (yet), but we’ve seen parts pairing software locks on everything from chainsaws to dishwashers. On this, we’re aligned with Worse on Purpose: Manufacturers can’t make our stuff worse and worse every year without us making noise.