A dot-brand that was actually used is shutting down
It’s been a slow year for self-terminating dot-brand gTLDs, but today we’ve seen our third.
Lipsy, a UK-based women’s fashion retail brand owned by Next, has told ICANN it wants to end its Registry Agreement for .lipsy, which it has operated since 2016.
What’s unusual about this termination is that Lipsy actually had quite a lot of registered domains — at least 133 over the years, of which 132 were still active a month ago.
My records show that all of its domains apart from the registry home page were deleted October 22, the day before the company sent its termination notice to ICANN.
The domains were generally product keywords which pretty much all redirected to next.co.uk or nextdirect.com; Lipsy’s own web site had also redirected to Next’s since 2018.
Almost all of its domains were registered between December 2020 and July 2022. It hasn’t registered any since.
.lipsy was on Verisign’s back-end until May 2023, when it switched to Identity Digital.
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Farewell Lipsy!