Omorpho Discusses Domain Upgrade from .fit to .com with Grit Brokerage

Our next episode of the Grit Brokerage podcast is now live.  In this episode, Grit Brokerage interviews the Head of Digital at Omorpho, Brandon Burroughs, about the decision and process of upgrading from .fit to .com. We get into the Nitty Gritty of why and how they did it.  We discover what Omorpho means and why they chose that name, discuss some of the pain points of using .fit and why a domain upgrade became necessary, and the negotiation behind acquiring the .com.  

Enjoy!

Brian Harbin: Welcome to the grit.org podcast!

I'm Brian Harbin here with Grit Brokerage today and the nitty gritty. So we're super excited about getting to interview Brandon Burroughs with amorpho. And he's from Portland, Oregon, graduate of Oregon State University, got MBA from San Diego State University, and has been head of digital with Amorpho for the past four years.

Previous to that, worked with Nike for about 13 years, and their head of product and experience on the digital side. And so today we really wanted to kind of unpack working with them on helping acquire amorpho.com. And Maureen's here to co-host with us today as well.

So, Brandon, welcome to the show today!

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, Brian, thanks so much! Happy to be here!

Brian Harbin: Yeah. So, you know, first off, for people that haven't heard of Amorpho, I guess, you know, how do you explain what you guys do or tell us a bit more about amorpho?

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah. So at Amorpho, we make an entire collection, a line of weighted training gear. And really what we've sought out to do is create, you know, a collection of products that people can integrate into any activity that they like to do. Whether they like to walk and hike, run, whether they're trying to improve their performance for their sports.

And by adding a little bit of weight that's naturally distributed around your body, you're able to challenge your muscles a little bit more, build up strength, endurance, toning, and actually burn more calories without changing anything but what you wear.

Brian Harbin: And where did the original concept come from?

Brandon Burroughs: You know, it was kind of our founder, Stefan Olander, he started working on this about in 2017, and it came from an experience of doing a workout that's known as the MRF, if you've ever heard of it. It's a pretty intense workout that's done sometimes on Memorial Day, and he had done it with a weighted vest, and it was a really, really bad experience.

But there was something about this idea of adding weight to your body and being at Nike. He was at Nike 22 years, I was there 13 years. And, you know, from day one that, like, the goal is lightweight, like the lightest shoe, the lightest shirt, the lightest shorts, but everybody puts on the lightest products that they can. They go in the gym, and the first thing they do is pick up a weight. And why is that? Because you need resistance to challenge your body to make you stronger.

And so that really kind of started down this path of thinking about, you know, nobody had really done kind of an elegant and accessible way of naturally adding weight to your body that could promote natural movement and add that challenge across a wide range of activities. And that's really kind of where Amorpho started from.

Brian Harbin: Yeah, it's a brilliant concept. And so tell us, coming over to Amorpho four years ago, tell us, you know, kind of your initiative and coming on board and kind of how your previous experience with Nike has helped you with that transition.

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah. I mean, Stefan and I both, we had worked together for a number of years at Nike when in digital innovation, and we did a lot of work together creating basically the whole host of Nike's apps. If you think of, like, Nike run Club, Nike training Club, we've created things like the fuel band. We did things in basketball and training.

And, you know, the common thread there was, you know, constantly learning, constantly trying to find new ways to break through and connect with consumers, trying to find new ways to help enable people to live a more fit life. And I think that was kind of a common thread.

And as Stefan was starting to turn the corner and go and like, hey, I think we've got a, I think we've got a product, and I think we've got a market, and I think we're going to, you know, we're going to launch this thing.

It just felt like a great moment for me to kind of switch gears, and I'd always kind of had that itch to try to build something from scratch. It's very different than when you're starting from a, you know, a large brand like Nike with tremendous resources. When you switch to a startup where nobody knows you and you're fighting for customer attention and you really just have to make sure you're getting the most out of every dollar, it's a very different mindset.

But I was able to take a lot of that experience and the learnings from when I was at Nike and really just directly apply those to Amorpho on day one.

Maureen: That's great! When you were figuring out how your name and brand was going to work, how did you decide on Amorpho?

Brandon Burroughs: So our founder is, he's half Swedish, half Greek, and the name amorpho actually comes from the Greek. A Greek word that means ‘beautiful’. And we really liked the, the, it's kind of a play on words, but the idea of morph being changed.

So morph is the root and then omorpho, meaning beautiful, really kind of points towards our prioritizing the aesthetic and the look and the quality and the way it makes somebody feel with our products. We weren't going to make just another clumsy, you know, weighted product. It was like, it has to be beautiful first and then functional second. So that's kind of where the name comes from.

Brian Harbin: And it sounds like that was a name that was established pretty early on, right? So they kind of knew that was the brand. And I think the first domain you guys started with was amorpho.fit, right? So walk us through that process. Or was it just the first available, hey, let's run with it until we can get something going kind of thing, or?

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, I think it was always intent. It was, it's always intended to be the brand. You know, it was a shame at the time that amorpho.com wasn't available out of the gates, but we felt like the world was starting to be more open and accepting to other domains. .fit was a nice play. Being that we're working in the fitness space. There were other permutations that we were able to get a .com domain for nothing. That was just the brand name.

So that was like, you know, we just said like, we're going to overcome. We're going to make  amorpho.fit the name. You know, there was some initial attempts to try to see if we could secure the .com domain, but it was just dead air. You know, it felt like we, there was a domain squatter that held it and wasn't really responding to anybody. And so we kind of just we said, you know, this is, this is it. It's go time. We got to, we're launching with fit.

Brian Harbin: Yeah. And did you guys acquire some other domains around amorpho.fit at the time or was that kind of the only one? And, and I do have a follow up question to you on that as well. Like did with launching with amorpho.fit, were there any challenges that you faced going with amorpho.com in terms of kind of having that extra explanation in terms of the brand?

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, there was a few other permutations we grabbed up. I'm trying to remember what they are now. But it was like, you know, amorpho gravity sportswear, which is our name of our collection. You know, we think we did get amorpho.fit and a few others, but nothing that was quite as succinct.

Yeah, so, and we still, I think we still, we still retain those as far as challenges, challenges with the dot fit domain. You know, it's just the, like, the authenticity was a challenge. You know, I think especially as a new brand that's just coming out. When you have something that's not a .com domain, the perception is very quickly of like, oh, this is a startup. This is, you know, maybe not established. You know, it affects the credibility of the brand, the trust, the immediate trust.

And then there's, you know, there's technical challenges too with, you know, spam filters, junk filters. Look at, you know, non .com domains a little bit more stringently than they do, you know .com. And so we were dealing with that as well. Things getting cotton in people's filters, you know, marketing that wasn't necessarily always getting through, you know, at the rate that we wanted it to get through.

Brian Harbin: Yeah, and I know too when it comes to domains there, it's not always necessarily the top priority in terms of, hey, we need to upgrade. But was there a tipping point for you? You felt like wherever it was time to go from amorpho.fit to figuring out the alternative?

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, I think we were about trying to think of the timeline, but we were about a year in and the, you know, we felt like we were starting to get a really good foothold our kind of early successes with, you know, some key athletes and entertainers as well as just our customers, you know, that learned about it and got it where it became like really strong advocates.

We were seeing a high repurchase rate. We were seeing a high advocacy rate, high NP's scores. Like, okay, this is, you know, we have something here. It's like, maybe this is a time to, you know, to try to try to secure the .com domain and really kind of establish ourselves. So that's kind of where we were at.

And then, you know, our, we tried kind of a direct reach out again to the owner of the domain and just, you know, no response. No response. And we were at a point where our, you know, our founder was ready to. He's like, yeah, I, you know, we're just not going to get it. We just got a, he was in a mindset of like, it's just going to be not fit, and that is what it is. We're going to make it work.

And that's when I started doing a little bit of my own searching. It was like, yeah, maybe, you know, maybe there's somebody that can help us do this, that does this. Like, this is what they do, you know? And through my own kind of web searching, I came across .grit and felt like that was a good fit for what we needed. So that's kind of where it started.

Maureen: Yeah, I was going to kind of ask you, but I think you pretty much answer it. What were the challenges you started facing when you knew it was time to change your name? But it sounds like, you know, you went through that process and realized you needed to come back to the .com.

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, I think. And also, you know, some of the things that I mentioned that were very explicit, like, we could see, you can see, you know, things getting caught in spam filters and whatnot. But there's also kind of like a softer side of it where, you know, you could read, like, talking with investors or, you know, kind of A-list athletes, entertainers, you know, you name it, and you could just sense a little bit of like, are these guys, you know, is this for real?

Are these guys going to make it? You know, is this, and I don't know that it was always because of the domain, but it was just one more thing that's very, you know, our brand, I'd say, especially being a D2C brand, you know, e-commerce.

Having an e-commerce site that's running our sales, like, it's just, it's something that people see every day. And the more and more we started putting it out in our marketing, we could just feel that it was like, yeah, these other brands sit at another level that just feels like we're still stuck in this small startup space. So a little bit of the softer side of just knowing it was time.

Brian Harbin: Yeah. When you're working with athletes that are then looking to put their name on it. They're kind of questioning, hey, do we want to associate with a company that, yeah, and working in digital for so long, I guess you'd never really kind of run across the domain problem before.

Brandon Burroughs: No. First time. First time I was fortunate enough to be spending most of my career working for brands large enough that it already, just like they'd secured it, was kind of a non factor.

Brian Harbin: And so it was pretty much a no brainer at that point in terms of knowing that you needed to get the .com and then, obviously kind of reached out to Maureen. And Maureen, you want to give us a little color on how that process went down and the initial conversations with the owner?

Maureen: Absolutely. Brandon reached out to me in June of 22. It was probably at the time when you made that decision, we need to go after this domain and to the point of what you were making when we talked, you told me for two years your CEO had tried to reach out to the owner and never gotten a response back.

And so I said, well, let me do what I can, what I do to try to reach out and get him to reply. And the big win was I got him to reply and we had gone in at a specific offer level to get him to reply back. And his price was definitely way more than the original budget.

But what I ended up doing was spending two months just going back and digging in and chipping away and telling him to let it go and that it was a very unique domain and that he, I remember he was very tunneled about knowing who was going to own it. And we don't talk about that. I mean, we just – That's not what we do. But I kept telling him it would be going to a very good home and that it would go to a live site.

And finally I got him to kind of let go of that focus, and he came down to a level that was pretty close to Brandon's budget. And so, you know, I got it down in half in price, and then we came to agreement, and then Brian worked his magic getting escrow done, I think, in two, three days max. And got you the domain.

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, I think, in there, too. There was a phase where I think he had – we had been willing to walk away, and I think that was, that helped us, please get it at the price that we were comfortable with. But I think we, like, we weren't playing just, like, hardball. We were just like, the first price was like, it was a non starter. We've just got it like, so we, in our mind, we had shut it down.

And it wasn't until a couple months later that Maureen came back to us and was like, hey, I got some news. It was just such a pleasant surprise. She never stopped, even though we had kind of like, we had just moved, we had mentally moved on, but Marine just kept chipping away.

Brian Harbin: And I'm curious too, Brain, in just the internal conversations because with what we do with domains, I mean, we never end up getting a price on a domain. And then the buyer is like, oh, that's a great deal. It's super cheap, let's go for it.

There's always sticker shock involved. Walk us through some of those internal conversations. Is it really just the fact that it's like, okay to use all this money? We're going to have to sacrifice XYZ and marketing. You're having to cut budgets or borrow money from somewhere else. It's an unexpected expense, obviously.

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, I mean, you're spot on. I think it was, you know, it's not something that you put in a budget. Unfortunately, being such a young startup, you know, our budgets are a little bit more fluid, you know, for us to be able to move things around. But, you know, being, it's like we, we had secured our product.

You know, we're really putting all our energy into marketing and so really it was a marketing trade off conversation and for us it was just one that was like, yeah, we just need to bite the bullet and do it now because it's only going to get more expensive in the future. And we know that it's a critical, kind of like foundational building block of this, of this brand, so.

Brian Harbin: Exactly. And, you know, one of the things too is sometimes it's hard to put an actual dollar amount on. What is the credibility look like, right, in terms of a cost and how can you justify that? And so once you had the domain, were there any kind of immediate effects and benefits that you saw from having it and upgrading?

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, I mean, I think there was like an immediate, you know, lift and just the kind of the credibility and the perception of the brand for sure. You know, we did have to deal a little bit with, you know, from an SEO standpoint, we built up, you know, an authority score and built up some momentum behind our .fit domain.

You know, as soon as we switched to .com, it was a hit. It took us about a year, year before we actually got it back to the level we were at before we made the switch. But it's a long game and so, you know, it was only going to get harder if we had, if we'd done it a little bit later. So, but, you know, everything else around it, like the, actually, the technical switch was super smooth. Super smooth.

Brian Harbin: And looking back, any kind of longer term effects that you've seen from the upgrade or anything other than the immediate effects of the new brand or the new name?

Brandon Burroughs: No, I think it's honestly, it's like, it just, it's one of those, like, once we had, once we had made that, that jump, it was just everything about the brand felt a little bit more like legitimized. It felt like it had leveled up the entire playing field for us, you know?

And again, from talking to investors to ambassadors to consumer perception to, we started to see over time, there was a lot of factors, but we started seeing conversion rates really start to rise. So I think it's going to be one of those moves that multiple years from now we look back on, we're like, man, that was a step changer when we did it.

Brian Harbin: Yeah, definitely. And I know you mentioned too early on that your product is really more of a B2C. At the same time, though. I know earlier this year you guys made the announcement you all had a partnership with Dick Sporting goods, which is huge. So now you're kind of in the B2B business as well. So I'm sure from that standpoint, it's been helpful as well.

Brandon Burroughs: It just opened up a lot of doors. I think it would have been. I think going into, we had conversations with Equinox, we were working with Dick's, you know, we've opened up, been doing some work with orange theory fitness. Like, there's just a lot of these channels that are only going to deal with, you know, legitimate brands.

And I think one of things that we kind of our internal credo, which is like, punching above our weight. You know, we're still a small company. We're coming up on our three year birthday in November. But I think that the brand has a presence that feels bigger. And I think part of that is it's like, it's the way that we do our marketing. It's the people that we work with and, you know, the .com is a critical part of just establishing the brand.

Brian Harbin: Yeah. And I've always... Go ahead, Maureen, what were you gonna say?

Maureen: No, go ahead.

Brian Harbin: Yeah. I always felt like from an internal standpoint, the team can really rally around. There's a lot of excitement that goes from going amorpho.fit to amorpho.com, there's kind of this, I feel like there's a team atmosphere. You know, recently we'd help, you know, a company, Baldwin risk partners, upgrade to baldwin.com and when you see, you know, people with the emails and, you know, there's, there's some kind of some internal juice that comes from that as well, I think.

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, it's – there's a – it's like – it indicates, like, staying power. It's like it's not going. It doesn't feel like it's a flash in the pan. It doesn't feel like it might go away tomorrow. It's like, oh, this is here to see.

Maureen: This is real.

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, this is real.

Brian Harbin: Well, fantastic! Well, Brandon, we really appreciate you hopping on today and love the product, what you guys are doing. I guess. Any product announcements or anything that you wanted to give a shout out to while you're on?

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, I mean, well, I just say we just launched an entirely new Heather gray collection of our gear this last Thursday, which has been just tremendous response from, again, from our customers, from athletes, I'd say. Check it out. We're always working on new styles, we're always working on new looks.

And because it's important to our customers, it's like they want something that's going to feel like an extension of them and they want their ability to express themselves through color and aesthetics. It's not just a functional piece. It's a beautiful, you know, integral part of their – your workout kit.

Brian Harbin: So, yeah. And for somebody like myself, for example, you know, 165 pounds, never really worn one before. Do you recommend, is there a certain, I'm guessing they have, like, interchangeable weights that come with it, or do you start with like a lower five pound and then kind of eventually build up?

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah. So out of the gates, our vest, all of our products are fixed amount of weights. And that was done intentionally to make sure that it was going to be the most comfortable, most flexible products and make it very easy on the decision making. You start to present a lot of different weight options and now all of a sudden, people are like, well, I don't know what I need.

And so we intentionally like our men's vest. We call it the g vest is ten pounds. Our women's g vest is five pounds. They're the most versatile. It's, it's our, it's our flagship product. It's the most versatile product that we make. And it's just so easy to integrate. So, you know, yeah, we need to get you into a g vest. So, you know, after this, get on our site and shoot me a note. Let me know what, what color you're looking for.

Brian Harbin: Yeah, no, definitely would love to wear one and, you know, add it to my routine. For sure.

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, it's great for everything from like, just throwing it on, going for a walk, going, you know, turns your walk into a workout if you like to run, if you do, you know, body weight, fitness, it's just, there's so many ways to integrate it. We get a lot of people who buy the – their gear thinking about like one specific use case and then they end up wearing it for everything because it is such a versatile piece. So, yeah, let's get you taken care of.

Brian Harbin: Yeah. If I wear a shirt over it, it makes me look even more bulky. Right? So that's a benefit, too.

Brandon Burroughs: There you go!

Brian Harbin: Well, thank you again! And this has been phenomenal and it's great for buyers that are in a similar situation as you to kind of hear the mindset. And I think for domain owners to see domains going in good hands of people that can really use them and monetize them and how beneficial it is to so many people. So thank you again for taking the time to hop on today. And, yeah, we're definitely cheering for you over here.

Maureen: I constantly tell everybody about your product. I just think it's great. So I'm your own little PR person over here, but it was phenomenal talking and working with you, Brandon, and it's been great.

Brandon Burroughs: Yeah, we're big fans of your guys. It was a no brainer coming on here. Just really appreciate the work you guys did for us and just can't thank you guys enough. So, much appreciation!

Brian Harbin: Thanks, Brandon! Appreciate it! We'll talk soon!

Brandon Burroughs: Okay. Take care!