It certainly is not.

BikesDirect.com acquires defunct brand names--Mercier, Motobecane, Dawes, Wndsor--and attaches them to bikes made for them by Taiwanese manufacturers. It's a low-overhead business plan.

I'm waiting to see what's going to happen with Dawes, thought. Dawes in UK was never defunct, they just stopped exporting. Now that they want to export again, they may have to fight for the right to use their own name in the US.