Group III International, who also runs the website SwissGear.com, has acquired the premium generic domain name BackPacks.com from Vertical Axis.
According to a job listing: “Group III International, has been a leader for over 30 years in luggage, backpacks & travel accessories. We are the official licensee of Wenger, Swiss Gear & BMW, as well as having two in house Brands French West Indies & Navigator. Our expertise in multi-category product licensing and manufacturing with a strong focus on backpacks and luggage has made our products some of the most recognizable in the industry.”
I had found a bit more information on the founder of Group III International LTD from a 2011 article on UML.edu which stated:
“Joy Tong, an industrial designer whom John Pulichino married 12 years before, had founded, in 1984, Group III International Ltd., a small boutique wholesale company that marketed fashion travel bags. It was a nice, successful niche business, he says, but with limited growth potential.”
“I thought I had retired—until one day she said to me, ‘Come help me with my business.’ So I said, ‘Okay, fine, I can do that.’ ”
“The result was a partnership that merged Tong’s design skills with her husband’s business experience and the retail contacts he had developed over the years. It didn’t take long to bear fruit: a 2003 licensing agreement between Group III and Wenger, maker of the 100-year-old Genuine Swiss Army Knife brand, has generated a company that, since 2003, has done more than $400 million in sales. With offices in Florida, Taiwan and Mainland China, Group III now distributes more than 60 products through Target Stores alone.”
“We started out as a small entrepreneur business,” says Pulichino, “that’s now grown to the point where we’re approaching $100 million a year in sales. And the great part is, I get to work side-by-side with my wife. She handles the design end of things, while I take care of the sales and marketing side. It’s a wonderful partnership.”
“The couple recently sold a majority share of Group III to a Florida-based private equity firm, though the company remains intact—with Pulichino still in the CEO’s seat and his wife still the creative director.”
Through a source, I was told that CEO John Pulichino made the contact to purchase the domain name BackPacks.com through a whois email and the deal was closed in person at Group III in Florida.
IMO, this is the perfect situation. Vertical Axis had seen the value in the generic domain name BackPacks.com, invested in it and has owned the domain name for a long time. Group III International has done well selling backpacks and felt the need to own the generic domain name and likely invested into at a large sum of money. Why? Estibot appraises BackPacks.com at a value of $1,170,000. There are 134,000 monthly natural exact match searches done on Google a month alone! Cost per click advertising is currently at $1.32 per click.
Add in the fact that the make sense value spikes easily knowing what the site offers just by seeing the domain name. Creditability rises just by owning and using BackPacks.com!
A company that offers BackPacks can not ignore the fact that 130K + exact match searches a month are performed just at Google. If you are not listed in the top 3, the likely hood of you getting that traffic only comes from paid advertising, which adds up quick. The $1.32 cpc mentioned with the 134K searches is for only one keyword “backpacks”. There are nearly 5 Million broad match searches monthly including the term “backpacks”. This raises cpc advertising very rapidly, when the domain name and its keyword strength alone can help the company rank naturally for many of these terms with decent SEO help and matching products and content.
Also to note, SwissGear.com, nor GroupIIICo.com rank well currently for the BackPacks search term and something needed to be done about that. They are going up against huge companies like Jansport, NorthFace, LL Bean, Target, Amazon, REI and hundreds more… BackPacks.com puts you in the game! Another example of this helping out a company that wasn’t that well known and didn’t rank well for the important keywords they needed to be, was the purchase of Candy.com by Melville Candy Company. They paid $3 Million for Candy.com but that paid off pretty quickly and brought Melville to the number 1 spot in Google for the prime keyword “candy”. It took a little time and money but not many were aware of Melville Candy Company prior to them taking the risk and spending the $3 Million on the generic domain name Candy.com.
Since the domain name BackPacks.com has been recently acquired, about June 12, 2015 according to whois records, Group III only has a coming soon page up as they prep the site for full launch.
Congratulations goes out to Group III on this very wise investment IMO and to Vertical Axis for closing the deal and having the vision of domain names being valuable a long time ago when not that many did. You can checkout SwissGear.com for some of Group III’s offerings and I’m sure we will hear more on BackPacks.com launching soon.
P.S. Did you see this sale publicly reported? Not until now and no exact sales price was provided, so it can’t be officially reported for X amount in some “top domain sales chart”, but the fact is…. a lot of really great domain names sell every day for six figures, seven figures and even eight figures and are not publicly reported. The billion dollar domain name industry is a strong one, even though it’s small but growing!
