Art suppliers like to have historical sounding names and to associate themselves with artists & artisans of the past. It’s disappointing how many of them actually turn out to have been bought out by some international conglomerate and now belong to the artistic equivalent of Nestlé.
In some ways it shouldn’t matter if they carry on producing good quality materials, especially if the smaller company wouldn’t have survived, but it seems a tad misleading that the marketing still presents the image of a small artisanal company long after that stops being at all true.
eg Winsor & Newton, Arches, Conté are all owned by the same company, whose parent company is Swedish.