It was announced today that Jet.com has acquired Hayneedle for an undisclosed amount.
This transaction was of interest to me, has Hayneedle started out as Hammocks.com and is also a large owner of generic domain names. Based on whois records, Hayneedle, Inc. owns over 9,000+ domain names and it is unclear at this point in the deal if and what domain names were included in the transaction with Jet.com.
Some generic domain names owned by Hayneedle, Inc. include:
- GiftBaskets.com
- CoffeeMakers.com
- Cribs.com
- Pans.com
- Trainsets.com
- Toasters.com
- Sleds.com
- ChristmasLights.com
- EndTables.com
- ComputerDesks.com
- DartBoards.com
- DiaperBags.com
- Firepits.com
- RockingChairs.com
and many, many more generic domain names in general. Again, it is not clear at this time if, or what domain names were included in the transaction to Jet.com, but I would expect that the deal included many of the above mentioned and potentially all of the 9,000+ owned by Hayneedle, Inc.
Of the domain names that I checked, like RockingChairs.com for an example, do a redirect to Hayneedle.com and a page for products matching the domain name.
The Jet.com domain name itself was acquired from domain name investor Gary Chernoff as reported by DomainInvesting.com in May 2014.
Hayneedle did a poor job executing their micro-site wrap up into the Hayneedle brand
They launched Hayneedle.com using the exact same pages/content as their micro-sites i.e. massive duplicate content. Their exact match domains lost authority to the mother brand hayneedle and the SERPS got crushed.
Lost momentum and was never really able to get much traction after that
Very interesting. Thanks for bringing this information to light.