How Obtaining a Brand Match Domain Name Sent Wine Club Sales Skyrocketing.

When Fraser Doherty, co-founder of Beer52.com, the most popular craft beer club in the world, wanted to take the wine side of the business to the next level, he knew he had to leverage the existing brand awareness they’d created over the last 10 years and launch on Wine52.com. Upon seeing that the domain was unavailable, Fraser enlisted the help of Saw.com to try and obtain it.

Wine52.com was owned by someone in China and Fraser had difficulty getting hold of the owner to discuss a possible deal as there was no website or landing page on the domain and the whois database contained no contact details for the current owner. Fraser also doesn’t speak Chinese, so even with contact details, a professional conversation would have been difficult.

With Saw.com having a mandarin speaker on staff, they set to work trying to track down and contact the owner to find out their plans for the domain and if they were willing to part with it. The current owner had bought the domain the previous year and had earmarked it for an imminent project (with 52 meaning ‘I love’ in Chinese numerology) so was not looking to sell. Rob Wilson at Saw.com monitored the domain over the next few weeks and noted that the project had seemed to stall. Seeing this, Saw.com touched base with the owner again (in their native language) and, after having time to think it over, the owner was more open to the domain changing hands. A deal was then negotiated by Rob and Saw.com dealt with all aspects of the deal from negotiation to payment and transfer of ownership to Fraser.

Obtaining the Wine52.com domain name allowed Fraser to have consistency between the beer and wine clubs, both with their own memorable yet related domain names.

Since acquiring Wine52.com a few months ago they have become the fastest growing wine club in the UK. This validates Fraser’s initial thoughts on the brand and what was needed to make is successful.

In an interesting ‘full circle’ moment, a few months after Saw.com negotiated this deal, Rob Wilson, the broker who handled the negotiation, got a completely random mailshot through his door for none other than the Wine52.com wine club.