Please correct me if my history is wrong, but aren’t those years the ones where they were trying to get back on their feet due to minimal retail production for the early years of WW2? So the factories were for war models not consumerism.
Seems like a good way to reach back out to former customers, and the general public to say "we’re still here!" and recoup after an impossible to describe tragic turn of historical events in our civilization’s history.
God help us if that were to ever recur.