On the morning of September 4, 2015 I had a pretty good hunch that the premium 2 letter domain name TN.com likely sold and now we have confirmation that it did and to who!
TN.com is now redirecting to TuftAndNeedle.com, which is a startup founded in 2013 that offers mattresses that are delivered to your door in a box. They are the buyers of the domain name TN.com.
Tuft And Needle has the highest rated mattress on Amazon.com and prices start from $600 for a queen and $750 for a California King, delivered to your door with free shipping.
So why spend, IMO, 7 figures on a domain name? Likely $1-3M. Tuft is a tough sounding word! It’s long as a domain name, 17 characters with the .com, so chances of mistyping are pretty high. Yes, people even type the invalid character “&” in domains.. which is yet again, another problem. Long winded compared to many startup names in today’s standards also.
Competition has heated up in the mattress business with another, very similar startup called Casper.
Just 16 months old, Casper says it clocked $30 million in mattress sales in its first year, and currently boasts an annual run-rate of $100 million. Ranging in price from $500 to $950, the company sells just one mattress model, which is available in six different sizes and never goes on sale. The company closed a $55 million funding round in June. Source
Casper is now Casper.com, although it started off as CasperSleep.com. In a July Domain Movers I mentioned the domain name upgrade for Casper and stated “Casper is the clear winner when it comes to domains, so I leave the mattress winner up to you!” in reference to Tuft And Needle at the time.
Branding!
This is a branding battle now, as both services are offering similar products / prices. One was Casper, the other Tuft And Needle but in domain name form it was Casper.com vs TuftAndNeedle.com. Now it’s Casper.com VS TN.com!
A domain name battle that some will say is now won by TN, because it’s a 2 letter domain name and it’s pretty hard to typo that and it should be MUCH easier to remember and promote! Think of the ink savings on the shipping boxes!
The battle is also heating up in the $15 Billion mattress market, as HelixSleep.com is a startup offering mattresses, as is Leesa.com according to this entrepreneur.com article.
So will Helix be the next domain name upgrade in the heated startup mattress field? Casper and TN shouldn’t be that worried IMO!
Congrats to Tuft & Needle on the great domain name upgrade but also a nice investment! and to the sellers, Vertical Axis!