Our Philosophy

I started PremiumBrands.com because a new company is judged by its name long before anyone has used its product, and the names that hold up to that are hard to find. The collection is small on purpose, and each name comes with enough context to picture a business on it. Every one has passed the test I use whenever I buy a name: would I build on this? BestHat.com passes it easily. It says what the business sells in two words, it is easy to say over a shop counter, and it gives a hat business a standard worth living up to. I have not built on it yet, and the names I have not built on are the ones I am open to selling.

From i-Newswire.com to Newswire.com

My clearest lesson about names came from my own business. In 2007 I acquired a press release distribution business that ran on i-Newswire.com. In 2013 I secured iNewswire.com, and in February 2015, after more than a year of negotiating and after consulting SEO professionals before changing anything, I moved the business to Newswire.com. Renaming a company that already has customers, a team and a reputation is slow, careful work. That year is the part of renaming nobody puts in the plan, and I spent it on a business that was already running.

The morning of the switch, a prospect told one of our sales agents, “Oh yeah, Newswire.com. I’ve heard of you guys.” That was impossible: the name was hours old on our business. It is the best example I know of a name doing its work before the company has had the chance to, and it is the standard I hold every name in the collection to. A hat shop opening on BestHat.com starts with that kind of name on its very first label, before it has sold a single cap.

Buying the name before the plan

I bought PremiumBrands.com before I had a plan for it. Premium names matter to me, and I knew that if I waited I would probably lose the chance. By now someone could be building on it, and once a business is running on a name, that name is most likely not for sale at all. So I bought first and worked out the plan afterward. The name was the scarce part; the plan was something I could always write.

The common advice runs the other way: launch on whatever name is free and upgrade once the business has made it. Plenty of good companies did exactly that, and I respect the work it took them. What the advice leaves out is the renaming year I described above, and the chance that the better name is gone by the time you can afford to ask. A hat shop that starts on the right name has no rename waiting for it down the road, and every label, hatbox and reorder it prints builds on the same name.

Why BestHat.com is in the collection

Most of my building happens through OnlineBusiness.com, my strategy and development studio, and the way I see it, the product side of a business has never been easier to reproduce. Software can draft a hat shop’s pages, photographs and emails in an afternoon, and a competitor can do the same the next afternoon. What it cannot do is hand that competitor this name. If I were building on BestHat.com, I would start with three everyday caps, explain each one properly and add a fourth only when shoppers kept asking for it. For a founder working that way, the name is one of the few parts of the shop that cannot be copied.

If BestHat.com is the name for the hats you want to sell, make or review, tell me what you would build on it. If a different name is the one you want, say so too; PremiumBrands helps founders acquire names that are not in the collection. You can read what the sale includes before we talk. A great name won’t save a bad business, and the hats, the fit and the service will always be the founder’s work; the name is the head start. A premium .com is a trust shortcut.