# Brand name



## darwyn (Feb 28, 2006)

I have the name of a brand of apparel I want to market (I'd rather not say right now though) and was trying to decide on my website address.

Should I use brandname.com OR should I use something like brandnameapparel.com or ....wear.com, or tees.com

You get the idea.

I'm thinking the ...apparel.com or wear.com would be more descriptive, but my tees (tees at first and I'll get into other clothing items later) are going to be heavily branded...and what I mean by that is that basically, I'm trying to sell an certain attitude. 

thoughts?


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## Fluid (Jun 20, 2005)

any of those you mentioned will work just fine. Since your the only one that knows the name, use the one that fits best. Easiest to remember and say.


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## Jasonda (Aug 16, 2006)

Brian,

Is the company that owns the original .com selling apparel? If so, I would look for a different name.

If not, any of the other options you listed.. ..apparel.com, ..wear.com, etc. are all fine from a branding point of view.


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## darwyn (Feb 28, 2006)

Well, in my search to get a domain name, everything is taken except THEbrandname.com. So it's either that or brandnamewear.com. No one to my knowledge is using my brand name to sell apparel though.

I was just wondering which would be the most impactful.

I'm leaning toward THEbrandname.com

Of course, brand name = the name I'm not telling you yet. Sorry, I'm still in the infancy stages here but I think it's a great idea.


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## Jasonda (Aug 16, 2006)

I think "THE" in front of the brand name is going to be a bad choice. It's going to be very easy for your customers to forget to type that in.


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## darwyn (Feb 28, 2006)

good point. I guess using wear would be better than, eh?

brandname.com is parked. I'll see if I can buy it cheap...otherwise, I may be stuck with ...wear.com


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

darwyn said:


> good point. I guess using wear would be better than, eh?


I think so. Obviously brandname.com is very much the ideal, but at this point in the domain name game we all have to be a bit more flexible


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## T-BOT (Jul 24, 2006)

darwyn said:


> ...are going to be heavily branded...and what I mean by that is that basically, I'm trying to sell an certain attitude.
> 
> thoughts?


heavy branding meaning a lot of exposure ?
then any short name that its easy to remember is all you need. Look at the BRICK name, they sell furniture. No connection there.

I find when you add things like wear...tees...etc. to the brand name, *you are boxing yourself in* or confuse it with the same name brand that belongs to someone else (without the wear..tees..etc). Things change and you may need to expand into who knows what beyond t-shirts....

you could be selling tees today, but in a few years you may find that selling funky long socks is what your brand is know for. (example) ..it does happen.


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## PrintMonkey (Jul 15, 2006)

Domains names are cheap.
So why not get them all and have them point to the one you want to use.

M


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## darwyn (Feb 28, 2006)

T-BOT said:


> heavy branding meaning a lot of exposure ?
> then any short name that its easy to remember is all you need.
> I find when you add things like wear...tees...etc. to the brand name, *you are boxing yourself in* or confuse it with the same name brand that belongs to someone else (without the wear..tees..etc). Things change and you may need to expand into who knows what beyond t-shirts....
> 
> you could be selling tees today, but in a few years you may find that selling funky long socks is what your brand is know for. (example) ..it does happen.


Heavy branding meaning I'd be selling this concept that happens to be on t-shirts. My efforts will be to make this concept synonomous with my brand...but yeah, I'm going to be do ALL the work (webdesign, tee designs, marketing, advertising, etc.), so as much money as that frees up as possible will be going to exposure.

So, in this case, I'd have to agree with you about boxing myself in. I'll check into buying that domain name (without ...wear, or ...tees).

Thanks! You guys have been a great help!

I'm still a good 3-6 months from launch (it's a lot of work! ), but I'll be posting a site review when I'm done.


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## darwyn (Feb 28, 2006)

Update:

Since my brandname domain was taken and after some thought, I figured I'd use THEbrandname. So I try to register it...and someone took it two days ago!! 

ARGhhh!

So I went ahead and immediately registered brandnameWEAR and brandnameBRAND.

It'll do for now I guess.

Oh! ...almost forgot...hostmysite.com is registering domains for $2.95 till Wednesday the 28th! If you are going to register a domain, now is the time.


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## Fluid (Jun 20, 2005)

> Since my brandname domain was taken and after some thought, I figured I'd use THEbrandname. So I try to register it...and someone took it two days ago!!


 Well that stinks. I bet someone saw the post here and nabbed it. I know some artists that did that many years back as they later sold the names for a pretty penny. Sorry to hear.
Good Luck with your new ones.


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## darwyn (Feb 28, 2006)

> Well that stinks. I bet someone saw the post here and nabbed it. I know some artists that did that many years back as they later sold the names for a pretty penny. Sorry to hear.
> Good Luck with your new ones.


I was thinking that too, but I never mentioned what the "brandname" was here on these posts, for the exact reason you mentioned. I have to believe that it's either a huge coincidence, or someone did some some legwork to figure that out. Cuz in this thread, I mentioned I called and emailed the owner of the site.

It sucks, but at least I now have a relatively good spot to start my business.


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

It wasn't taken by the person you contacted to buy the main domain from?


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## JonWye (Feb 13, 2007)

Keep it simple (ie no "THe, Brand, apparel, wear, etc after for before your words." If need be settle on .net. Hello people... AmericanApparel.net. Granted they use americanapparelSTORE.com too, but they are a big company you are small and the extra words only hurt your brand in the beginning. I suggest reading the book 22 immutable laws of branding.


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## Jasonda (Aug 16, 2006)

JonWye said:


> Keep it simple (ie no "THe, Brand, apparel, wear, etc after for before your words." If need be settle on .net. Hello people... AmericanApparel.net. Granted they use americanapparelSTORE.com too, but they are a big company you are small and the extra words only hurt your brand in the beginning. I suggest reading the book 22 immutable laws of branding.


I disagree. I think brand.com/apparel.com/wear.com are ALL better choices than .net. You don't want to take the chance of your customers typing brand.com rather than brand.net and ending up at a blank page or your competitor's website.

I've actually typed in americanapparel.com several times without realizing my mistake. I'm sure there are others who do the same thing. If there wasn't a link on that page, I imagine there would be a lot of people who would be lost at that point.


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## JonWye (Feb 13, 2007)

I completely disagree. If you were looking for American Apparel (the trendy basics t-shirt maker) you wouldn't be confused by what is at americanapparel.com. It looks too homemade, doesn't fit the branding image of AA. You would automatically know you are in the wrong place. 

Yes, .com is the best, but in light of it realize that most people will find you through your good marketing efforts, PR, and branding efforts. People won't be looking for you unless they have heard of you, so keep it simple, and keep it to your core, ie core brand name. 

If someone tries to put up a site with your clothing company name in .com form then they are screwed because they are entering Trademark infrindgement. But if some other company puts up a site using your company name in .com form then you don't have to worry again because anyone that goes there will realize that it is far removed from your branding efforts, your company identity.


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## JonWye (Feb 13, 2007)

I meant if some other company (unrelated to clothing or tees) puts up a site using your company name in .com form then you don't have to worry again because anyone that goes there will realize that it is far removed from your branding efforts, your company identity.


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## darwyn (Feb 28, 2006)

Thanks for the comments!

I've currently registered brandnameWEAR and brandnameBRAND. Both are dot com's.

I think this will have to do for now. Until I get huge and have enough money to buy them out.


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## darwyn (Feb 28, 2006)

Solmu said:


> It wasn't taken by the person you contacted to buy the main domain from?


I dont think so. Different whois results. Probably just a coincidence, unless they registered it under a different name on purpose.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

JonWye said:


> Keep it simple (ie no "THe, Brand, apparel, wear, etc after for before your words." If need be settle on .net. Hello people... AmericanApparel.net. Granted they use americanapparelSTORE.com too, but they are a big company you are small and the extra words only hurt your brand in the beginning. I suggest reading the book 22 immutable laws of branding.


I actually don't think AmericanApparel did a good thing by going with .NET instead of the .com (which was already taken).

People type in .COM instinctively and I bet americanapparel has lost a lot of traffic from their printed ads because of the .net. Luckily they have a link on the americanapparel.com website name, but not all startup companies will have that luxury.

My advice is to stick with an easy to remember .com when it comes to getting a domain name for your business.


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## MZDEELO (Oct 14, 2006)

T-BOT said:


> I find when you add things like wear...tees...etc. to the brand name, *you are boxing yourself in* or confuse it with the same name brand that belongs to someone else (without the wear..tees..etc). Things change and you may need to expand into who knows what beyond t-shirts....


 
i totallly agree with you on this.

initially, our company was going to be just "Totalitee" but before we purchased a domain name, i brought up the same point to my partners. i said What if we wanted to do hoodies down the line? it would sound odd to just be totalitee. so i convinced them to calling it "Totalitee Apparel" the tee in totalitee will always represent our roots and what we started with but the apparel allows us to grow within the same field without having to change our name.


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

JonWye said:


> I completely disagree. If you were looking for American Apparel (the trendy basics t-shirt maker) you wouldn't be confused by what is at americanapparel.com. It looks too homemade, doesn't fit the branding image of AA. You would automatically know you are in the wrong place.



Customers are fickle. If they swing and miss, there's a definite chance they will just walk away and say screw it. With any print/TV/Radio ads, I think it's very important to have a dot com.

Case in point: It's illegal to advertise gambling saites that aren't free to play in the US. However, I've seen TV ads where the company advertises it's legal side site technically, with the aim of getting people to go to the pay dot com. 

It's kind of funny to see; the ad is for, say, reallylongnameBODOGpoker.net, but they keep just saying bodog and even coloring it different on the screen so it's what people remember. Since that's what they remember, and most people associate Internet sites with dot com, they just go straight to bodog.com.

(I'm sure a more exact and better researched explanation of this can be Googled as well.)


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## Titere (Sep 14, 2006)

I disagree. I know that .com is better, way better, but .net is the best next thing. I chose titerewear.net cuz if it is hard to remember .net it is way harder to remember - and othe kind of symbols (not in t-shirtforums.com as we write t-shirt all the time) anyways, the thing is that rather have .net .org than having symbols which can be forgotten and or misplaced. Here in PR there is a very huge car enthusiast community and their site is carrito.net and just everybody knows this because they have a huge campaign and most of their users have vinyl stickers that say carrito.net, you see it every day hundreds of times. Everybody say carrito.net refering to the community, never say just carrito. The IMPORTANT thing is to make people remember it, PUBLICITY. .net aint that bad, it depends on what you do to make people remember it. Anyways the people interested in your product will remember.


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

Titere Wear said:


> I disagree. I know that .com is better, way better, but .net is the best next thing.


While it's not just for network infrastructure anymore, people don't really expect commerce when they hear net. I don't just think it's a bad choice because of the primacy of dot com, I think it's a bad choice because it's an inappropriate useage.



Titere Wear said:


> is is way harder to remember - and othe kind of symbols (not in t-shirtforums.com as we write t-shirt all the time)


t-shirtforums.com and tshirtforums.com also both end up at the same place. If a word is naturally hyphenated I think registering both is a good idea.


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## steve marshall (Mar 6, 2007)

Hi there . The important points are .1. Easy to remember, 2. As short as possible. 3. If the name isnt descriptive of what you do you will need apparel or something, if you are too specific it might limit you in the future. Finally you could go completely wacky and choose something memorable but doesnt meen anything ie egg, orange, google, yahoo. Good luck with your project. new member steve.


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## Parlophone (Feb 8, 2007)

make sure you do your USPTO.gov trademark research first. you would be surprised how easily it is to infringe upon somebody else's work.. even words that 'sound' similar will get your sued.


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## sp8092 (Mar 27, 2007)

Steve Marshall said it best…

The best name is going to change on a case by case basis. areallylongname.com is far worse than short.net. What is available is going to be the deciding factor.

-Shane


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