A Brief History of Gloves-Online.com

This week in 1991 the World Wide Web (WWW) was founded.

It was just 5 years later that, Joe McGarry, launched Gloves-Online.com.

To put this innovative endeavor into perspective, this was around the same time that Amazon initially launched its bookstore and 2 years before Google was founded.   

The timing of the Gloves-Online.com URL and the uniqueness of the URL domain name alone is a great example of it’s the early entry into the internet WWW world. Some of you may recall the heydays of the early .com era and the drive to have a web presence at that time. During this time many opportunists were buying up all sorts of URL names without any intentions to build a web site but with the only objective to sell the name to an eager buyer.

FYI, below are very interesting examples of the most expensive domain names recently publicly reported:

·  CarInsurance.com — $49.7 million.

·  Insurance.com — $35.6 million.

·  VacationRentals.com — $35 million.

·  PrivateJet.com — $30.18 million.

Joe also owns glovesonline.com but he preferred the novelty by using the “hyphen” in the name and for a better look to users. Glovesonline.com is a redirect domain as well as gogloves.com.

It’s interesting to contemplate what the value of the GO Gloves and Gloves-Online domain family of URL internet names are worth today.

Our evolution’s through the years….

GO Gloves, which the company is commonly called today, was the very first web portal in the world devoted exclusively to gloves. GO Gloves was an offshoot of Polygenex International, Inc. which was founded by Joe in 1990 and became the largest domestic manufacturer of specialty high-tech knit gloves. GO Gloves was originally developed as a source of glove information for people searching for glove know-how on the internet.

The existence of the original Gloves-Online information web site actually led to a new unforeseen opportunity to actually sell gloves that people were searching for but could not find. 

The very first gloves that GO Gloves featured for sale on the internet where high-quality white cotton gloves including the gloves that were manufactured by Polygenex. These white gloves, often referred to as parade gloves, were selected since people were searching for sources of these gloves since they were difficult to find locally or at department stores as in the old days. As examples, these types of gloves were used by church ushers, bell choirs, funeral pall-bearers, military guard units, marching bands, catering companies, cotillions, Santa Claus outfitting, and doorman just to name a few. Consequently, a new internet business dedicated to hard-to-find gloves was born.

The rising popularity of GO Gloves was reflected by its search history which was just over 1 million page views by the year 2000 and doubled to just nearly 2 million page views only a few years later. Today, Joe no longer provides this data for obvious proprietary reasons but it’s become one of the largest glove sources on the internet with a world-wide audience.

Industrial & Work Glove concept….

In 2008, GO Gloves launched its sister web site Industrial Gloves Online which was focused exclusively to work and industrial gloves. The Industrial Glove web site was set up under a separate URL domain so that buyers looking for work gloves had easier navigation without filtering through all of the consumer glove listings. However, all of the gloves listed on the industrial work glove web site are also available on the main original consumer Gloves-Online web site.

The Glove Guru Blog….

Also, in 2008, Joe developed a special blog devoted to gloves called The Glove Guru. The blog covers useful glove information, glove technical data, and valuable and beneficial glove suggestions. The advantage of the Glove Guru Blog is that it contains more in-depth information about particular types of gloves that is difficult to include on a product description and this information remains as a permanent archive on the internet. The Glove Guru Blog also has its own search engine so you can easily locate articles and information on gloves.

Today….

During all this time, we’ve done “major” up-grades and modernized our web sites over 10 times using the latest web site technology and shopping cart functionality including web site security processes and friendly web site navigation.

Gloves-Online also has a very robust internal search engine integrated within the web sites to make it very easy to find and locate a glove by its design, manufacturer, or use. Our site search engine will also locate a glove that is featured on both of our web sites regardless of which web site you are searching from using the search box.

Today, GO Gloves serves over 13,000 dedicated customers, stocks over 2,500 glove styles, represents over 34 glove manufacturers, and ships gloves worldwide.