Lately on television I have seen ads from Pandora. Actually two companies using Pandora as their brand. Both companies are well known of course.
Pandora.com registered in 1993. An American subscription-based music streaming service owned by Sirius XM Holdings.
Pandora.net registered in 1997, founded in 1982 the company is a Danish jewellery manufacturer and retailer.
Perhaps not being an American company the .com is not as important to the Danish company. But should it be? Would PandoraJewelry.com be a better alternative. (Someone else owns it).
This is the tricky nature of having your brand name be a popular name desired by many. Owning the .com does give you an advantage because for many it’s the default extension.
While looking for a bracelet, someone might go to the .com and subscribe for the streaming service. Both sites are offering something all kinds of people enjoy and consume.
Then there is Pandora.tv which is a South Korean user generated video website.
There is another tv ad running daily for a utility company called Essential which operates on Essential.co. Andrew Rosener sold the .com for $250,000 back in 2015.
Roman is another example. The .com has been owned by a company that sells over 6,000 gifts and decorative accessories. The company advertising their telehealth services uses GetRoman.com. They own the .co but it does not propagate.
No matter what they do they will be in a bad domain situation. The right answer is to not get into that situation in the first place or quickly rebrand when the issue comes up in the early stage. Not worth worrying about whether .net is better than a .com with a superfluous word on the end.
The solution is probably just to worry about something else, there is damage there from a bad domain choice but it cannot be easily fixed. The boat has a small leak, as long as they don’t make lots of similar bad choice they will be ok.
I’m sure Pandora.net would love to own the .com, but even though they do not own it, it’s still a global company with over 7000 shops in more than 100 countries and a turnover of $3 billion a year
As an owner of a small Australian Jewellery business; ImpressJewellery.com I knew that obtaining the English ‘and’ American version of Jewelry (within the domain name) was just as important for me when starting off.
Pandora faces that issue with pandorajewellery. com or should I say pandorajewelry. com
Did you not consider au too? Unless you are targeting a global market for your business?
Most definitely; It is important for any Australian business to own their .com.au name as well! (our go to cctld extension)
Many Australian local jewellery stores only promote the .com.au with only a small portion visibly promoting .com only. Pandora promotes its jewellery with just pandora.net in Australia.
Interestingly Pandora does not own their .net.au version here (our lesser used cctld extension)
Getting back to your question I own impressjewellery.com.au and impress.jewelry