Who’s Been Sleeping On The Job At Derek Rose Pyjamas?

Thanks to a heavy dose of the cold, I find myself unable to sleep and am up at this ungodly hour on a Sunday morning tapping away at a keyboard.

Someone who is obviously sleeping more soundly than me is whoever is responsible for renewing domain names at Derek Rose, the London based nightwear company.  I know this because he or she didn’t renew the domain name DerekRose.co.uk and yesterday it was released by Nominet.  Which means it was available for anyone to register.

With nothing really catching my eye in yesterday’s drops, I decided to catch it and register it with a view to returning it to Derek Rose – and I’ve already emailed them to arrange this.

Not that I’m guaranteed a reply.  Over the past year or so, I’ve probably done this a dozen times for companies.  I’m not trying to hold them to hostage – it’s little more than a good deed for the day type of gesture.  Out of those times, I’ve had three replies to my emails and faxes.  And of those initial replies, only one company has actually bothered taking the name back.  They thank me profusely and say someone from IT or Marketing or wherever will be in touch – then nothing.  Strange, but true – and more proof that so many companies don’t really get the internet.  It could cost hundreds if not thousands of pounds to get back a domain name and yet when you offer it to them for nothing nobody seems to want to know.  Or even know what’s going on.

To be honest, I hadn’t come across Derek Rose until last year when I started selling pyjamas on one of my websites, Peejays.  I’m not a big pyjamas fan myself, but I do know one thing about Derek Rose.  The company could do a lot better sales-wise online.

And I’ll share two reasons why because hopefully it will be of value to anyone reading this.  Including the marketing people at Derek Rose.

First, when you are marketing to a UK audience, a .uk domain name is going to be more attractive to your audience.  Currently, Derek Rose use the domain name, Derek-Rose.com.  Nothing wrong with that per se, but DerekRose.co.uk would deliver more sales.  Here’s why.  As part of their Domain Name Report for 2009, Nominet asked people in the UK a simple question:

“If you did a web search and were presented with the choice of a .com or .uk web address, which ONE would you be most likely to click on first?”

77% of people stating that they would select the .uk search result first.

So it makes clear sense for UK companies to develop a .uk domain name (even if they also like the idea of a .com name for worldwide sales).  Which means registering DerekRose.co.uk (let alone allowing that registration to lapse), but then not developing it, was and is a mistake.

And this brings us on to the second reason why I know that Derek Rose could sell more pyjamas online and it’s down to search engine visibility.  Go to Google and search for Derek Rose.  Search the web and lo and behold Derek-Rose.com sits proudly at the top of the search results.  No surprise there.

Now repeat that search for pages in the UK – the preferred option for so many of the UK’s internet users.  The Derek Rose website – despite being from Saville Row, London – is nowhere to be seen.  Absolutely nowhere.  Stockists of Derek Rose pyjamas appear, but not the Derek Rose website itself.  Which just has to cost them sales, especially direct sales.

My guess would be that this is because Derek-Rose.com is hosted outside of the UK and Google doesn’t see it as relevant to UK searches.  Using DerekRose.co.uk would change that practically overnight.  The .uk domain name would be the only cue Google would need to include it in its UK search results (no matter where it was hosted) and before long it would be sitting – exactly where it belongs – in the number one slot.  And that could only lead to more sales for Derek Rose.

So if someone from Derek Rose would like to contact me, we can get the ball rolling with regards returning DerekRose.co.uk.  I’m not expecting any financial reward for returning it or even a share of the profits generated if they do implement my suggestion above with regards to UK search.  A pair of pyjamas for the missus would be nice though.