You may have noticed something different about our web address. We've officially moved to unstablecotton.com, no hyphen, no fuss, no $500 ransom paid to a stranger on the internet.
Here's how it went down.
The Origin Story
When we launched Unstable Cotton, the obvious domain, unstablecotton.com, was already taken. So we settled for unstable-cotton.com and moved on with our lives, selling funny t-shirts and occasionally giving away oven mitts to the 8th customer of the day.
The hyphen was fine. Not glamorous, but fine. We told ourselves it had character.
The Offer We Didn't Need
Last week, the owner of unstablecotton.com reached out with a generous offer to sell us our own brand name for $500.
We ran the numbers. We declined.
Here's the thing he apparently didn't know: the domain had already expired and was sitting in a pending deletion queue, which means it was days away from becoming publicly available to anyone willing to pay the standard registration fee.
We found a service that specializes in exactly this situation. They monitor expiring domains and snap them up the moment they're released. We paid essentially nothing. The domain is ours.
The Part That Gets Better
He keeps emailing.
First it was $500. Then $400. Then, we assume, some amount lower than $400. We haven't checked lately because we're busy running a cat-powered t-shirt company and don't need to negotiate for something we already own.
If he gets to zero, we'll let you know.
What This Means for You
Practically speaking: not much. All the old unstable-cotton.com links still work and redirect automatically. Bookmarks, links from other sites, anything you've already saved, it all points to the right place.
Going forward, the canonical address is:
Easier to type. Easier to remember. Harder for expired-domain speculators to leverage against you.
The Boardroom Has Weighed In
Our senior leadership team, pictured above, convened an emergency meeting to review the situation and unanimously approved the migration. The agenda was brief. The coffee was strong. One attendee's mug said "World's Best Cat," which we felt was accurate.
The presentation slide says it all: Lose the hyphen.
Motion carried.
Shop the New URL
Same weird shirts. Same free oven mitt policy. Same cats in charge.
Browse the full collection at unstablecotton.com
And if you were holding off on buying something because you were confused by the hyphen, that excuse is officially gone.