Building consumer brands that earn their place in the home.
Prime Brands Group is a multi-national retailer and brand owner. We develop, source and sell own-brand products across luggage, kitchen, home, garden & outdoor, and footwear.
The model
A big machine behind every brand.
A house of brands only works if each brand stays close to its customer. Ours do, and everything that does not touch the customer is shared.
Flight Knight sells to a traveller worried about cabin size limits. air pro sells to someone with condensation on a bedroom wall in January. POLAR sells to someone who wants a slipper they can wear all winter. MONHOUSE sells to a household replacing the things it uses every day. Those are different conversations, and we keep them separate.
What we do not duplicate is the machinery. Product development, factory relationships, quality assurance, freight, compliance, marketplace operations, data and customer care all sit with the group. A brand team gets to obsess over its category while inheriting the scale, terms and reach of a much larger business.
It is a deliberately unglamorous model, and it is why our brands can move from one market to the next without rebuilding themselves each time.
Principles
The questions asked in every range review.
Not values on a wall. These are the arguments that decide whether a product goes into the range.
Is the everyday version good enough?
We compete in categories where the standard product is usually mediocre, and getting the ordinary right is most of the job. It is not the ceiling: where a feature genuinely earns its place we build it, as with SmartVoice voice control.
Does it do what we say it does?
If we call a case cabin-approved, it has to fit the sizer at the gate. If a dehumidifier is rated at 12 litres a day, that is what it should pull out of the room. People plan around what we put on the box, so we would rather under-promise and let the product do the talking.
Chronology
From footwear in 2008 to eight brands.
Growth by category rather than by acquisition, each move made once the last one could stand on its own.
- 2008
Founded in footwear
The group starts out in footwear, the category VIVA Shoes and POLAR still lead today.
- 2017
Into home appliances
Home and comfort appliances follow, opening the dehumidifier, heating and air-treatment ranges that air pro and MONHOUSE are built on.
- 2019
Into luggage
Luggage arrives a few months before the pandemic closed the travel market. The category was rebuilt as travel returned, and now runs to three brands.
- Today
Eight brands, one warehouse
Eight own-brand businesses across luggage, home, kitchen, garden & outdoor and footwear, shipped from a 70,000 sq ft warehouse the group owns and operates in Hertfordshire.