Being a rare beast that of a domainer and also a business owner using domains, I wanted to do a series on how to leverage a killer domain in the real world. Some may remember I paid 700,000USD for Furniture.co.uk and I am working to build a valuable business on that domain and sell out for £10s of millions.

There are many different aspects I am working on and in time will record it all here to show how I achieved it by using a killer domain.  Here I talk about branding, really important to get across what you are about, why buy from you, what’s your story.

Branding

Its a double edge sword using a category domain such as furniture.co.uk. The upside you don’t have to explain what you do, the downside it has no character.

We are selling online only and we wanted the logo to show that but we had to get our personality/story into the brand furniture.co.uk. The way we have achieved this is by putting furniture.co.uk in a search box in a very simple text but the background we express our creativity and craftsmanship by using bold, often colourful imagery like the examples shown below.

These images are used primarily for high-level brand campaigns with the logo only.

• The logo stands out well and we can create the brand image around the background imagery about creativity or inspiration. It is less about specific aspects of furniture and more about the company.
• To express our craftsmanship we use detailed shots of the furniture – this will tell a story about the process and the care we put into everything we do.

We now can achieve our branding goal of being creative, contemporary and with craftsmanship but also we now have the benefit of saying we are a leader in this field and we sell online just by using the domain Furniture.co.uk. The imagery and logo speak for itself, it’s self-explanatory. I don’t even need a strapline.

I can now also show how that will work in a magazine Ad. Its very striking imagery that I don’t have to explain anything, the brand/logo of furniture.co.uk and imagery does it all

On our trucks, I can use mood type boards similar to what an interior designer would use. Everything says we are number 1 and creative and that’s what you can do with a category killer name

Finally, animation of the logo we would use at the end of youtube videos, it looks as if it’s a search box, no explanation needed, we sell furniture online, click below to play

Furniture Logo White

Next, we are building the website and I will do a post once we have completed.