Ida is a register, not an opinion. Every card is built from public documents, and every line on it points back to one.
A card answers four separate questions, and Ida keeps them separate on purpose, because they are usually different facts about different companies. "Made by" is who actually manufactures the product. "Sold by" is whoever distributes or sells it, which is sometimes the maker and sometimes a separate company entirely, including cases where a brand is sold under license and two companies split every sale. "Profits flow to" is the line that matters most: the parent, investor, or family that the money ultimately reaches once a purchase is made. And where a brand's tier is not independent, Ida offers "Independent instead" — other brands in the same category, sourced the same way, where ownership stays with the people who built the thing. None of these four lines is a proxy for another one; a card never collapses "made by" and "sold by" into a single row, and it never infers who profits from who manufactures.
Every brand in the register is placed in one of five ownership tiers. Independent means the brand is still owned by its founders, its family, or its employees, with no outside financial owner controlling it. Investor-backed means a growth investor or minority stakeholder holds a position in the company, short of full control by a private equity fund. Private equity means a private equity firm or its fund owns the brand outright, or holds the controlling stake. Conglomerate means the brand is one of two or more acquired brands held by the same parent company and still sold under their own separate names — a company such as a large consumer-goods holding group that owns several distinct brand names is a conglomerate for this purpose, not a private-equity owner, even though the mechanics of the acquisition can look similar. Public company means the parent that profits is itself a publicly traded company whose shares anyone can buy, distinct from a private-equity-owned brand where ownership is concentrated in a single fund's investors. A tier is a description of who currently profits, not a judgment about the brand's quality or the people who work there.
Every card also carries a confidence state, and the state is as important as the claim itself. Confirmed means at least two linked primary documents agree with each other — filings and disclosures from the SEC on EDGAR, a live trademark registration from the USPTO, a company press release or a private-equity fund's own portfolio page, or a state filing such as a Secretary of State business registration. Reported means Ida has exactly one such document, which is enough to publish but not enough to call settled; a second document upgrades it. Unverified means Ida has not yet found a primary document at all, and the card says so instead of guessing. Stale means a record has not been re-checked in the last six months and its underlying ownership may have changed since; ownership moves fast in consumer goods, and a stale record is flagged rather than presented as current. A brand that is missing a document is never quietly treated as independent — a missing link caps the record at Reported or lower, and the card says "not yet sourced" in plain sight instead of leaving a blank that reads as "nothing to report."
Ida ranks its sources and shows which kind backs each line. SEC and EDGAR filings and USPTO trademark records sit at the top, because they are filed under legal obligation or examined by an agency. Company press releases and a private-equity or growth fund's own portfolio pages come next — the company or the fund is stating the relationship itself. State filings, such as a Secretary of State's corporate registration, corroborate who legally controls an entity. A brand's own label or website can support a record but is never treated as authoritative on its own, since it is marketing copy, not a filing; the same goes for whatever a retailer prints in its own "manufacturer" field on a product page, which Ida shows for reference but does not rely on. A signed attestation from someone in a position to know can also stand alongside a document. Ida does not republish data from PitchBook, Crunchbase, or OpenCorporates — those are aggregators of other people's research, not primary sources, and using them would mean re-publishing a claim Ida cannot itself verify.
Ownership is a fact, not a score. A card never tells you a company is good or bad, never guesses at a firm's intentions, and never editorializes about why an owner bought a brand. It states what the documents say: who makes it, who sells it, and who the money reaches. Any charisma in the writing is in how a fact is put, never in a claim the documents don't support.
Every card has a "Think we're wrong?" link, and every record on this site can be challenged from it. A correction that comes with a link to a document — a filing, a registration, a press release, anything that shows the correct fact — beats what's currently on the record, because that is the same standard Ida holds itself to when it publishes a card in the first place. A correction without a document is still logged, but it takes a document to change what the card says.