What's in a name? In this case, quite a bit of confusion perhaps. Of course we know just from looking at the logo that the brand name is spelled Käthe Kruse. But with the limited character set of the internet and American English keyboards we run into some problems.
- First, the Internet body that manages domain names doesn't allow diacritical characters in URLs (Uniform Resource Locators.) So www.käthekruse-usa.com can't be registered.
- Second, there is a vowel combination that's the equivalent of the Germanic ä, ae. It's a way to write a-umlaut without using a special character. Thus Kaethe = Käthe but this is not common American knowledge. Using www.kaethekruse-usa.com IS an option and even brings you to this web site.
- Third, search engines treat diacritical characters differently so that a search for Kathe Kruse provides vastly different results than searching for Käthe Kruse or even Kaethe Kruse.
- Fourth, in the USA, we can't easily type the a-umlaut. Most of us would have a difficult time typing a Google search for "Käthe Kruse dolls."
So in America we can't type an ä, aren't familiar with the ae combination, but still need relevant search results. As a compromise, we end up using Kathe Kruse as a proxy for Käthe Kruse. That leaves us with kathe-kruse.eurosourcellc.com which is technically incorrect but is the way North Americans type and refer to Käthe Kruse. On our web site, where it is visible on the page, we consistently use Käthe, but in page titles and meta data used by search engines we use Kathe.
