Monica Kirchner and Kirsten Hansen are seated in the lap of luxury, co-founders of a company that presides over not one single app or website but the whole lot of high-end domain names that end in ” .luxury.”
For brands, these new website endings can potentially represent not just a new url, but a fresh way to shop, market and communicate with crème de la crème consumers.
Some 500 brands from Bvlgari to Versace, signed up for their own .luxury top-level domain (TLD) name in the initial 60-day sunrise period in which registrations were only available for trademarked brands.
Now the .luxury name is available through internet registrars including CentralNic which has launched a dedicated website, www.domain.luxury through its TRS subsidiary.
CentralNic Group PLC said Monday that it had launched a new website, DOMAIN.LUXURY, for the sale of new domain names ending in .luxury through its subsidiary TLD Registrar Solutions.
CentralNic chief executive Ben Crawford said: “.LUXURY is one of the most successful new TLDs to launch so far, having already signed over 500 brands in their Sunrise.”
The generic top-level domain name .luxury is now available for sale to the general public, giving brands the opportunity to further define their status online.
According to Dot Luxury, Chanel, Gucci, Cartier, Valentino, Van Cleef & Arpels and Bulgari already purchased .luxury domains during a 60-day period where only trademarked brands could register. This claims to be the first luxury-specific top-level domain, and aims to provide a more central luxury space online.
“Luxury” brands such as Cartier and Formula 1 bought multiple domains during sunrise. Some tech firms, such as Facebook and Google, continued their blanket approach to defensives.
With such a high price, one wonders what some of these rights holders are thinking: do they really believe cybersquatters are prepared to drop $700 a year infringing their brands?
Luxury has become much more than a concept; it’s a coveted commodity, a club to which even budget brands now crave entry.
The internet, conversely, has always been a place where everyone starts out equal – in theory, at least. You buy a small corner of digital real estate and hang out your shingle, presenting your goods and services in whatever manner you choose.
There is about to be a huge land rush on the internet. Web registries — companies and organizations that manage and market web addresses — are unleashing approximately 1,500 new top-level domains, or TLDs, in the next eighteen months. The TLD is the set of letters to the right of the dot — as in, .com, .org and .biz.
“If you think about the history of the Internet and the history of domains, this is pretty massive,” said James Cole, a spokesman for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which reviews and approves applications for new extensions. “It could potentially affect every Internet user.”
People can purchase new Web addresses via registrars such as GoDaddy, Network Solutions and Name.com. Many already allow interested buyers to preregister for new addresses.
Starting Jan. 29, the first of hundreds of new top-level Web domains—the suffixes that appear at the end of website addresses like .com and .net—will become available for the first time in more than a decade.
The web is about to have its big bang. About 1,000 new generic top-level domain names, or gTLDs (the last bit of an internet address, such as the com in qz.com) will come into existence this year. On Feb. 4, anybody will be able to create and start running a website on the first of the new domains.
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