I can still feel it like it was yesterday. Me sitting at that bar with my best friend, trying to explain how badly I screwed up.
In 1999, I was a general manager for St. Louis Bread Company. I had just built a new home with a three-car garage. I wanted the third stall because I was gonna get my damn boat. That was part of the dream too.
But big dreams come with big price tags. I had three small kids and a big mortgage and things parents worry about: car payments, college tuition, and whatever life might throw at us. My mom used to tell me, “Eric, you're living a champagne lifestyle on a beer salary.” She wasn't wrong.
Money was tight, and the restaurant business was barely paying the bills. SportsTrunk was supposed to change all that.
Around the turn of the millennium, ecommerce was still finding its footing. I could see where it was heading. I remember looking at projections for how big online sales could be, and I started doing the math. What would just one percent of that look like? The number was huge. I didn't need the whole damn pie. I just wanted my company to get a small slice of it.
That's all I needed. I traveled to vendor meetings, established reseller relationships, and started building a sporting-goods company.
And then I made one hell of a mistake.
I let SportsTrunk.com expire.
Domain registrations weren't cheap back then. I kept putting off the renewal, and then I forgot. When I tried to register the domain again, it was gone. Someone else had it.
Sitting there with my friend, I remember saying, “They took my name. My business is gone. What the fuck am I gonna do?”
Technically, nobody had taken anything from me. I screwed that one up all on my own. But knowing that didn't make it any easier to live with.
SportsTrunk wasn't just a web address. It came out of my brain. I had dreamt it up, sweated over it, and started to build a company around it. I believed it could change my family's lives forever.
Then came another gut punch. After trying earlier to register the domain, I received an email offering me an opportunity to buy it back. I don't remember the price. It was far more than I was willing, or able, to pay.
I was mad as hell. I looked at my friend.
“Fuck 'em. I'm not paying it.”
For several weeks, I didn't have a better answer or have a clue what to do. I wallowed in it. I wondered whether I should forget SportsTrunk altogether and create something new. That sounds dramatic when we're talking about a domain name, but I wasn't mourning a URL. I thought I had screwed up the thing I was counting on to build a different life.
They had the domain. But they didn't have SportsTrunk.
Then it dawned on me. It was so simple.
Just add one character: a hyphen.
On May 19, 2002, SportsTrunk was reborn as Sports-Trunk.com. It wasn't the name I had originally envisioned. SportsTrunk.com rolled off the tongue perfectly, especially with the slogan I'd created for the company: “Looking for sports gear? Get in the Trunk... SportsTrunk.com.”
But something funny happened over all those years. That little compromise became the name.
SportsTrunk went through phases. Technologies changed. Ecommerce platforms shifted beyond anything I could have imagined when I started. Other businesses, jobs, responsibilities, and life itself sometimes put SportsTrunk on the back burner.
But I never let it die. And the hyphen stayed.
Recently, I've been rebuilding SportsTrunk. New products, new collections, a cleaner store, a broader vision. During that work, I cleaned up how the domain connected to the store. Nothing earth-shattering. Just housekeeping on technology.
Then I opened the site in my browser. Sports-Trunk.com. I just stared at it.
And I got chills.
For a moment, I wasn't thinking about Shopify, DNS settings, products, or my to-do list. I was thinking about the younger version of me who sat on that bar stool convinced he'd destroyed his future.
Life didn't follow the business plan I had in my head. But the company was still here. So was I.
And that dash between Sports and Trunk—the character I once viewed as evidence of one of my biggest mistakes—didn't bother me so much anymore. It finally looked right.
Maybe that's what happens when you live with a workaround long enough. Eventually, it stops reminding you of the future you thought you'd lost and starts reminding you of the future you refused to give up on.
Sometimes the thing you build around a mistake becomes part of the story you keep.
The hyphen wasn't Plan A.
Twenty-five years later, it's home.