Velvet.com (“not for sale”) Gets Sold

I tried to buy Velvet.com a couple of times over the years. In mid-2019, I offered $45,000 to buy the domain name and was told Velvet.com was not for sale regardless of how much I offered, and I was asked to not contact the registrant again. In fact, there was a message on the website for quite a while to let people know the domain name is not for sale:

velvet.com is not for sale
We get inquiries about this every couple of weeks. The velvet.com domain is not for sale at any remotely sane price.

We know that velvet.com appears “underutilized” or “underdeveloped” to people who think of domains primarily as promotional devices for public Web sites. We don’t think that way, we have other uses for the domain, we are happy with those uses, and we don’t want to sell.

Yes, if offered enough money, we would probably bend on this. However, nobody is going to offer us that much money, because it’s far, far more than the market value of the domain, and far, far more than any buyer would ever recover from any business use of the domain. At present, the minimum it would take to get us to part with the domain is $250,000.00 US. If that price goes down, we’ll post it here, but don’t hold your breath.

So, unless you’re a rich lunatic who wants to throw away money, please don’t bug us about it.

This morning, my DomainTools Domain Monitor tool email alert listed Velvet.com as pending transfer. I visited Velvet.com, and the landing page indicates that the domain name has been sold.

It is not yet known who acquired Velvet.com (or why), but it was likely an expensive acquisition. The interesting thing, from my perspective, as that as the years passed, the $250,000 minimum became closer to a wholesale-level pricing that wouldn’t take a “rich lunatic” to afford.