Well in a sense it is. If you want to get technical, like he stated, vans has many levels of accounts, as does sole technologies.
In stead of just calling every line at vans a totally different name like soletech has, they just call it all vans and it does make it harder to differentiate between whats "limited" and whats mainstream besides aesthetics.
Where as with altamont versus emerica clothing, it was geared for small shops that catered to a different crowd. Kind of the same thing , just trying to show the correlation between both brands.