A company called SmartyStreets has rebranded itself as Smarty. Smartly, Smarty was able to acquire the brand match Smarty.com domain name in advance of the launch of its rebrand. Smarty announced the forthcoming rebrand in late 2021, and the company’s website now fully resolves at Smarty.com.
In a blog post announcing the rebrand, the company’s CTO shared one of the biggest reasons for why the company felt it was necessary to shorten its brand name:
It seems like H&M is getting set to launch a new brand called Seam on the brand match Seam.com domain name. The company promises a “new era of fashion.” Jamie Zoch shared his findings on Twitter this morning:
It appears that premium generic domain name https://t.co/nQ8QrQOumr has been acquired. The domain was owned by Cambridge Collaborative, Inc. who was acquired by Altair in 2019. The domain now holds a Coming Soon page. H&M Hennes & Mauritz GBC AB is on Privacy Page & likely buyers
— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) May 20, 2022
If a company is going to use a non .com extension, it will serve the business well to incorporate the extension into the brand name. Spanning the dot with the brand name will help hammer home that the extension is part of corporate branding. This should help reduce consumer confusion when they want to visit the website or connect with the company online.
TechCrunch published an article this morning about a company called A.Team. As you can see, the company is using a .Team domain name and its brand name spans the dot:
A retail technology company called GetUpside, which offers consumers cashback for purchases at retailers, announced it rebranded following a large Series D round of funding. The company shortened its brand name to Upside and acquired its brand match upside.com domain name.
There’s only upside for users, merchants, and our communities – and now we have a name to match! We’ve also completed our Series D fundraising round led by @generalcatalyst. Read more in our CEO’s post: https://t.co/xSJ4CxQgvL pic.twitter.com/HsXnQoT3T2
— Upside (@upside) April 26, 2022
According to the blog post announcing the rebrand and funding round, Upside has achieved unicorn status with a $1.5 billion valuation.
WarnerMedia and Discovery completed a massive merger, and the combined company is now known as Warner Bros. Discovery. The news was announced on the company’s @wbd Twitter account:
We are excited to announce that WarnerMedia and Discovery, Inc. are now Warner Bros. Discovery. pic.twitter.com/PscY04cK9L
— Warner Bros. Discovery (@wbd) April 8, 2022
Smartly, the company acquired the WBD acronym-matching WBD.com domain name for this newly merged media company. WBD.com is now being used for the company’s website. Whois records show Discovery, Inc. is the new registrant of the WBD.com domain name:
A year and a half ago, Andrew Wilkinson, Co-Founder of a company called Tiny, shared some thoughts about how he felt when someone referred to his company as “Tiny Capital,” because the company’s slightly off-brand domain name was TinyCapital.com:
Nothing makes my eye twitch quite like when somebody calls our company Tiny Capital instead of Tiny.
Same thing happened with MetaLab. We couldn’t get the domain, so we got https://t.co/fchhsL2Uhy.
Forever “MetaLab Design” instead of MetaLab.
— Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) October 1, 2020
