Whatsmybrand, a new service due to launch in May that would allow consumers to search for food and drink products that fulfil their specific ethical, dietary, and nutritional needs, has lost its domain name after, it appears, failing to renew its domain name registration.
The Whatsmybrand.com domain has now been bought by a Swiss ‘domainer’ called DomCollect Worldwide Intellectual Property AG. Instead of going to the company’s substantial pre-launch website, all traffic now goes to a Sedoparking page instead.
Whatsmybrand had received significant press coverage over the last few months as it signed up a series of top brands such as Cadbury, Hovis, Ryvita, Jordans, Quorn, McCain, Dorset Cereals and Filippo Berio. And, this week, Waitrose became the first retailer to join the service with the idea that, when a consumer searches for items with ethical credentials, the site would flag up Waitrose’s own label lines.
InternetRetailing.net was unable to reach the company for comment this morning. But, with luck, the new owner is in the process of negotiating to pass the domain name back to Whatsmybrand for a not too unreasonable sum of money and, with a salutary lesson learned, it will be back to business as usual.
And, since the company had not yet launched to consumers, it does have the option of changing its name — but that would leave it without the benefit of all the press coverage and Google ‘juice’ it has acquired to date.