The brand on the badge never had a factory
In 1927, a Sears catalog offered a washing machine under a name almost nobody had heard of: Kenmore. F1 Within fifty years, that name was on more appliances in more American kitchens than any other. F2 And Kenmore never had a factory, or a company, or a single engineer on its payroll.
And on the day Sears died, the name kept selling, on machines Sears never built, from a company that no longer owns Sears.
We are going to show you who actually built the Kenmore in your basement, how one badge got put on machines from four different factories without anyone telling you, and the three digits on the label that say which one you are looking at.
If you walked into a Lowe's this week, you probably believe Kenmore is a manufacturer with its own plants and its own designs. That is an illusion. And it is an illusion that was working perfectly, right up until the company behind it ran out of money.
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When Sears sold half the washers in America
Picture it. It is 1938. F3 In St. Joseph, Michigan, a company called the Nineteen Hundred Corporation is building washing machines. F3 Sears is its biggest customer by a mile. Sears does not want its name on the machine; it wants a name that sounds like a place where things are made well. Kenmore. There is no such place. It is a name invented for a catalog.
The arrangement is simple, and it is the same arrangement that built Craftsman tools: Sears writes the specification. Sears sets the price. A manufacturer builds it. Sears puts the name on the front. In 1950, the Nineteen Hundred Corporation renames itself after its most successful product line: Whirlpool. F4
For the next sixty years, if you bought a Kenmore washer, there was a very good chance you were buying a Whirlpool with a different control panel. That was not a scandal. It was, for most of that time, a very good deal. Sears bought in enormous volume, demanded quality, and backed the name with the largest service network in the country. A Kenmore repairman drove to your house. The parts were in the truck.
By the 1970s, Kenmore was the best-selling appliance brand in the United States. F5 It was not an appliance company. It was a promise, and Sears kept it.
The crack: a catalog company with no plant of its own
Here's the crack. In 2005, a hedge fund manager named Edward Lampert merged Kmart and Sears into a single company, Sears Holdings. F6 He did not come from retail. He came from finance. And he looked at Sears the way a financier looks at anything: as a collection of assets that could be separated and sold.
Sears had three brands worth real money: Craftsman, DieHard, and Kenmore. Over the next decade, all three would be treated as collateral rather than as products. In 2017, Craftsman was sold to Stanley Black & Decker for about nine hundred million dollars. F7 Kenmore stayed, because nobody would pay what Lampert wanted for it.
And in 2017, something happened that would have been unthinkable twenty years earlier: Kenmore appliances went on sale on Amazon. F8 The brand that existed to bring people into a Sears store was now being sold by the company that was emptying those stores.
How badge engineering actually works
Now, the part almost nobody knows. As Sears weakened, it lost its leverage over its suppliers. In October 2017, after a fight over prices, Whirlpool stopped selling its own Whirlpool-branded appliances through Sears. F9 It kept building Kenmore, quietly, for now; a year later it would show up in the bankruptcy papers as one of Sears' biggest unpaid creditors. F9 Whirlpool no longer needed Sears; it had Lowe's, Home Depot, Best Buy.
And Sears, for years by then, had been doing what it had always done: buying from whichever factory would build to its price. The Kenmore Elite refrigerators and front-load washers of those years were built by LG. F10 Some ranges and dishwashers came from Electrolux, the parent of Frigidaire. Some came from Daewoo. The logo stayed the same. The machine behind the logo changed with the year and with whoever had the better deal.
Here is how you tell. Every Kenmore carries a model number, and the first three digits before the period are a manufacturer code. One-ten is Whirlpool. Seven ninety-five is LG. Two fifty-three is Electrolux. Six sixty-five is a Whirlpool dishwasher. F11 The full table is on the site, and we'll come back to it. But notice what this means: two Kenmore refrigerators, side by side, same badge, could be an LG with a linear compressor that has been the subject of a class action, or a Whirlpool with a conventional compressor that runs for twenty years. The badge tells you nothing, and the code tells you everything.
If you want the ownership map for every appliance brand, not just Kenmore, it is on the site. One page. No email required.
What it cost the people who built them
On October 15th, 2018, Sears Holdings filed for bankruptcy. F12 At its peak the company had employed more than three hundred thousand people. F13 The stores that had sold Kenmore for ninety years closed by the hundreds. The repair trucks stopped coming.
Picture the customer. A family in Ohio bought a Kenmore Elite refrigerator in 2016. [EX] Twenty-two hundred dollars. In 2020, it stops cooling. [EX] The compressor. They call Sears service: the number still works, barely. The part is an LG part. The warranty is a Sears warranty. The company that sold it is in bankruptcy court, the company that built it says talk to Sears, and the class action that covers the compressor was filed against LG, not against the badge on the door. F14
That is what a ghost brand costs you, and it does not cost you on the day you buy it. It costs you on the day it breaks.
In 2019, the Sears assets, including the Kenmore name, were bought out of bankruptcy by a company called Transform Holdco, controlled by the same Edward Lampert. F15 Kenmore appliances are still sold today, by Transformco, through Amazon and a shrinking number of stores. The brand outlived its parent and its factories. What is left is a name, licensed to whichever plant will build to a price.
So what does a Kenmore badge tell you today?
So what do you buy instead? You buy a factory, not a badge. Three answers, and the reason for each.
One. If you want a washer that will still be running in twenty years, Speed Queen, built in Ripon, Wisconsin, by Alliance Laundry Systems. F16 Metal transmission, no sealed drum, parts available for decades. It costs more than a Kenmore did, and less than replacing a Kenmore twice.
Two. If you already own a Kenmore, read the code. A one-ten series washer is a Whirlpool direct-drive, one of the most repairable machines ever built in America. Do not replace it. Repair it. The part that fails most often, the motor coupling, costs less than twenty dollars. F17
Three. If you are buying a refrigerator, buy on the compressor, not on the door. Conventional compressor, no linear, no Wi-Fi, no screen. The models are on the site, with the manufacturer codes, updated each year.
Cost per year of use, not price on the sticker. Take the prices on the shelf today: a Speed Queen at about fifteen hundred dollars, a Kenmore top-loader at about seven hundred. F18 Over twenty years, one Speed Queen is seventy-five dollars a year. [EX] A Kenmore that lasts twelve years and gets replaced once is about the same, seventy dollars a year, if the second one holds. [EX] And a one-ten Kenmore you keep and repair yourself is the cheapest of all, around forty dollars a year. [EX] The sticker does not decide it; the year it breaks does.
The full Lifetime List for washers and refrigerators, with every source in this video, is linked below. Buying through those links supports the channel and costs you nothing.
How to buy a washer when the name means nothing
Somewhere in America right now, a couple is buying their first refrigerator. It says Kenmore, like the one in their parents' kitchen that ran for twenty-five years. They believe they are buying that. They are buying three digits they have never been told to read.
Now you know. Check the code and check the factory, and do not pay for a name that stopped building anything a long time ago.
If you owned a Kenmore, tell us in the comments: the model number, the year, and whether it still runs. This archive gets written by the people who used the machines, not by the people who sold them, so your model number matters more than ours.
Same company, opposite decision: the tool brand Sears did sell, and what the buyer did with the promise to bring it home. That is the death of Craftsman, on screen now. Tap the card, and I'll see you there.