Feeling around the Web’s soft underbelly (ewww!)

Ahhh, the Interwebs. So vast. So expansive. So chock full of knowledge and information and macrame tips. It truly is a wonder to behold. Even better, you can have one of those ‘web sites’ with amazingly little effort: All you need is a domain to call your own. That, my friends, is where the fun starts. (And by ‘fun’, I mean something akin to what the settlers must have experienced buying snake oil from hucksters out the back of covered wagons.)

Our own story of adventure began innocently enough, by naming the company Gabardine. It was, we agreed, pitch-perfect and rich with meaning, i.e. We come up with big ideas and weave them through a company’s marketing communications, like a continuous thread that strengthens and extends the brand fabric.

But, alas, it seemed that gabardine.com was already spoken for. A ‘domainer‘ had parked a nasty contextual ad-serving page there, and according to Internic, there was a legit owner. What was a young company to do?

Being the creative geniuses we are, it only took a couple of weeks to come up with the novel idea of using gabardinestudios.com, instead. ‘Phew,’ we thought, the prospect of coming up with another doozy of a company name weighing heavy on our minds.

And then, well, we just went about growing our business. You know: Taking meetings. Designing stuff. Breaking in the corporate card. Writing stuff. Snorting NoDoze. Killing it.

Still, something seemed…off. Like we weren’t completely legit because our domain didn’t match our company name. Of course, we knew this was completely irrational and that lots of businesses go the Plan B route because it’s either too costly or too much of a hassle to get the domain they really want. (Group favorite: Open.) But that knowledge wasn’t enough to stamp out the burning flame of domain desire.

So we set about investigating what it would take to make gabardine.com our own. We expected the worst. A king’s ransom, perhaps. A first-born male child. The head of Alfredo Garcia. We were way off.

Our first attempts to contact the domain owner directly were less than successful. Actually, that’s the nice way of saying it. In truth we were given the run-around between what seemed for all intents and circumstances like two different shell companies posing as registrars of gabardine.com and, we’re sure, countless other domains. Fed up and, frankly, a little queasy, we decided to bite the bullet and try a more conventional route of paying the folks at sedo.com to track down the real owner and sort the whole mess out.

…we were engaged in a steel-cage deathmatch with an unnamed, unseen dark force that wanted to suck us dry for the privilege of owning a domain…

Here’s how Sedo works: You pay $69 for them to track down the real domain owner and extend an offer that you pretty much pick out of thin air. Ours was $850. That’s right, 850 smackeroos. The thinking was that if a textile magnate with an interest in finely woven fabrics was out there, s/he’d probably be using the domain productively. This certainly didn’t appear to be the case, judging from the cheesy, squatter-like page that was posted, so we figured $850 was a good place to start the bidding.

According to Bill, a ‘domain broker’ at Sedo, we figured wrong. He said they had contacted the owner, who promptly countered with an offer of $7000. The penny, as they say, dropped. We understood instantly that we were engaged in a steel-cage deathmatch with an unnamed, unseen dark force that wanted to suck us dry for the privilege of owning a domain that s/he most likely obtained by going through the dictionary in the hopes of a nice, fat payday. We reluctantly countered by nearly doubling our offer to $1600, and pointed out that negotiations were officially over.

Bill said he was ‘working closely with a colleague on the deal,’ as the owner was in Korea, and translation was an issue. (Great.) We held our collective breath for a few days and then, lo and behold, the textile magnate agreed to our price! But the fun wasn’t over yet. It took almost two weeks, another Sedo representative (Colin, my Transfer Consultant) and—surprise!—a 10% commision for Sedo before we were able to navigate our way out of the rat hole of wire transfers and domain permissions.

In the end, though, we got the domain we wanted without sacrificing an arm or a leg.

And the experience of being exposed to the seedier side of the Web? Priceless.