Brandopoly

The Brandopoly Story is an ongoing series on the history of Brandopoly: its beginnings, growth, and reinvention as told by CEO and founder Tom Trapp. The first installment is on the origin of the Brandopoly name:

It’s interesting to hear what people do in their spare time. A friend of mine, Harold takes boulders and scrap wood and fashions them into some of the most amazing sculpture pieces you’ve ever seen. Another friend, Russ, visits Civil War battlefields and can explain with the excitement of an eyewitness the intricacies of many major and minor battles. As for myself, I play a game where I try thinking of ideas for companies. Not companies that I would necessarily want to run, but companies I think would be fun to create.

The process usually starts with a url and then I fill in the details later. It’s always seemed like a safe place to start because without the web address, I felt it wasn’t viable. In the late 90’s and for a few years after that, I used to sit around late at night plugging words into Netsol to see what was available. I was consistently amazed by what words were still available that far into the dotcom boom. On one such night, July 1, 2002, the word brand was on my mind and after hitting a few dead ends, Brandopoly popped into my head. It was available and so I registered it.

The question I asked myself was what is it? A check in the dictionary told me “opoly” meant control. All these years of playing Monopoly and I had no idea it meant one entity in control. So Brandopoly simply meant brand control. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but the answer was only a few weeks away.