Earlier this week French supermarket giant E.Leclerc launched a new site for their sports’ goods. The key change? The new site lives at sport.leclerc. Leclerc, which employs over 94 thousand people, is one of the companies that opted to get its own “dotbrand”. While some companies have rolled out a variety of different things on their own domain extension it’s still rare to see a brand launching anything with mass market appeal using their own TLD.
Here’s how the site looks at present:
The new site was picked up in the French media earlier this week:
L’adresse URL du site, sport.leclerc, exploite les nouvelles possibilités de dépôt de nom de domaine (le “.leclerc” remplaçant le “.com” ou le “.fr”). La parapharmacie en ligne de l’enseigne, dont le lancement est attendu dans les prochaines semaines, sera construite sur le même modèle.
Le distributeur, ainsi, a déjà enregistré des adresses comme parapharmacie.leclerc, drive.leclerc, optique.leclerc, voyages.leclerc, etc.
Which basically notes that the new site is using a .leclerc domain name, which is an alternative to .com or .fr. The upcoming launch of an online drugstore will also use a .leclerc domain. They also note that LeClerc has registered other domains under .leclerc that cover other verticals. What they don’t seem to have really addressed is that LeClerc has 100% control of the namespace and can register pretty much anything they want.