Last reviewed: August 7, 2026
How we research, verify, and maintain accurate information about brand ownership across industries and geographies. Our rigorous approach ensures that every piece of information on Who Brands meets our high standards for accuracy, completeness, and reliability.
We begin with official company filings and authoritative sources, including SEC EDGAR database documents (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K reports), annual reports, official press releases, and corporate investor relations materials. For international companies, we consult regulatory filings from relevant jurisdictions. These primary sources provide the most authoritative information about corporate structure, ownership, and acquisitions.
All information is independently verified and cross-referenced with reputable business publications including Bloomberg, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and industry-specific publications. We consult multiple sources to confirm accuracy and identify any discrepancies that require further investigation.
Acquisition dates, founding years, merger dates, and historical milestones are verified through multiple independent sources. We maintain detailed timelines of corporate changes and cross-reference dates across sources to ensure accuracy. When discrepancies are found, we investigate further to determine the correct information.
Our database is continuously updated to reflect corporate changes, acquisitions, mergers, divestitures, and new information. We monitor major business news sources daily and prioritize updates based on market impact and relevance. When significant changes occur, we update our records promptly and note the date of the update.
All content undergoes rigorous editorial review for accuracy, clarity, completeness, and neutrality before publication. Multiple team members review significant entries to ensure consistency with our standards. We verify that all claims are supported by cited sources and that information is presented objectively without bias.
Who Brands adheres to the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) framework, which is recognized as a standard for high-quality content. This framework ensures that our information is reliable, authoritative, and trustworthy:
Our team brings extensive experience in business research, financial analysis, journalism, corporate law, and brand development. We have deep knowledge of how corporate structures work and how to navigate complex ownership chains across different industries and jurisdictions.
We specialize exclusively in brand ownership and corporate structure, developing deep domain-specific expertise. Our focus allows us to understand nuances in corporate relationships, subsidiaries, joint ventures, and complex ownership structures that generalist sources might miss.
Our content is based exclusively on authoritative primary and secondary sources. We maintain rigorous fact-checking standards across all entries and clearly cite our sources. Our information is recognized as a reliable reference for brand ownership data.
We maintain complete editorial independence and transparency. We clearly identify ourselves, our sources, and our methodology. We do not accept payment for coverage, favorable representation, or any form of bias. Our commitment is solely to providing accurate, unbiased information.
We rely on authoritative sources including:
A company is the legal corporate entity (e.g. Procter & Gamble Co.). A brand is the consumer-facing name owned by that company (e.g. Gillette, Tide). We maintain separate profiles for each and map the ownership relationship between them. A single company may own hundreds of brands; a brand always has exactly one current owner.
We classify companies as Public (shares traded on a stock exchange), Private (not publicly traded, owned by founders, families, or private equity), Subsidiary (wholly or majority owned by another company), or Joint Venture (co-owned by two or more entities). Where ownership is partial or complex, we note the relevant percentage and structure.
When ownership is disputed, in transition (e.g. a deal announced but not yet closed), or genuinely unclear from available sources, we note this explicitly on the relevant profile page. We do not speculate or publish unverified ownership claims. We update these profiles as soon as the situation is resolved and confirmed through primary sources.
We classify a brand as "Independent" when it is not owned by a larger parent company that owns multiple other distinct consumer brands. This includes brands that are privately held by their founders, as well as brands that are themselves publicly traded companies. We verify independent status through the same primary source research process.
We believe in being transparent about the boundaries of our data:
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