Dot Com

Whew.  I'm writing from the other side of an extremely painful process.  Naming a business in the dot com age is an endless source of frustration.  It's hard enough to come up with something both relevant and catchy and with a future in mind.  But then, you have to see if the domain is available and if the social media handles are free, and sometimes some wily speculator is totally ready to sell you that special domain name for a four figure price.  One I liked was commanding five figures.  FIVE FIGURES!  

I bought craftscout.org thinking that was perfect for the short and long term vision only to find out that the Boy Scouts of America have a lockdown on the use of scout in a name for any organizations.  My partner in crime tells me that it didn't matter because the social media handles were taken anyway.  That is very important for a brand, particularly ours.

I fell in love with Skiff, as in small boat or craft, with the bigger picture in mind, only to find that this is a premium domain name because it turns up all the time in online searches.  ALL THE TIME. I suppose just because I haven't been searching out "skiff" doesn't mean others haven't.  It's awfully close to "skill" - the "L" and "F" keys are in the same row after all.

Luckily, I have some very clever friends.  Almost too clever.  From the beginning they had a name they were lobbying for, a name that made me giggle and that I struggled to say as my tongue is way too big for my mouth and I don't enunciate particularly well.  When I told the woman who is doing our logo and website design, before I even had a partner in crime (a whole other story), she loved it, but didn't push as I told her I wasn't sure.  She bought the dot com (yes, it was available!) she said as an homage to a friend, but now I wonder if she was planning to lead me back there.

My new partner in this endeavor, a wonderful woman who has all the skills I lack and provides the perfect amount of push to develop momentum, liked the name for its sassiness, but graciously read all my emails and made many suggestions of her own.  And then we realized, or I realized what everyone else has known all along, that the perfect name was already there in front of us, with all the social media handles available, with the dot com waiting to be realized.  It might be that no one else was crazy enough to take this name on, but it's all there waiting to become a school of the handcrafts.

It's scary and exciting and exhilarating.  We've signed a lease.  We're working on the logo.  We're developing systems and putting together legal documents and bank accounts.  

We are doing this.