Methodology

Three different facts

“Where is it from?” has several honest answers. OriginViz keeps them apart:

• Origin country — where the brand was created: the country where its founders or founding organisation were based when it launched.
• Owner — the ultimate parent company that controls the brand today, and since when.
• Owner country — where that parent company has its headquarters. If its legal domicile differs from its operational head office, the page says so.

Origin is not where products are made. A brand created in Sweden may be manufactured in many countries. Manufacturing data is only meaningful for a specific product model and date, so it is not part of this dataset yet.

Kinds of ownership

• Owned — wholly owned, directly or through subsidiaries.
• Controlling stake — the owner is the majority or largest controlling shareholder, but other shareholders exist (for example Geely and Volvo Cars).
• Shared ownership — control is split between parties from different countries (for example Red Bull).

Regional licences — such as Hershey making KitKat in the United States — are described in the brand’s notes rather than changing its owner.

Reading the map

• Origin vs owner colours: blue-grey means the owner is in the brand’s home country; vermilion means it is owned from another country; amber means shared ownership.
• Tile size: by default, area is proportional to the square root of the brand’s age in years. It is a factual, sourced number — it says nothing about sales, value or popularity. You can switch to equal sizes.
• Group size reflects how many brands from that country, category or owner are in this dataset. It is a measure of our coverage, not of any country’s economic weight.

Sources and review

Every origin, founding and ownership claim cites at least one source; the build fails if one does not. Entries have two levels of status:

• Sourced — cited, but not yet checked by a human editor. These pages are kept out of search engines.
• Reviewed — an editor has checked each citation, ideally against a primary source such as a company filing or official history, and the review date is shown.

0 of 124 entries are reviewed so far. Dates on OriginViz are never refreshed automatically: a “reviewed” date means a person checked the page on that day.

What we leave out

• Sales, market share, valuations or popularity — we have no comparable verified figures for them across all brands.
• Third-party logos — brand names are shown as text and remain trademarks of their owners.
• Rankings of countries. A country with more tiles simply has more entries in the dataset.

Corrections

Every page has a “Report a correction” link. Tell us the page, what is wrong and a source on the corrections page.