Stan James

» see stanjames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Stan James was 45 years old on the day it was switched off, which makes it older than the web by two decades. It started in 1973 as a single betting shop run by two partners, Steve Fisher and James Holder. Sources disagree about the exact town. The company's own account puts the first shop in Wantage, Oxfordshire, where the business stayed based for the rest of its life, while other listings place it just over the line in Compton, Berkshire. Either way it was a small firm in a stretch of country thick with racing yards.

By the 2000s the chain had passed ninety shops. The online arm had been in planning since the late 1990s and it is what the name came to mean for most people, because a British bookmaker with under a hundred branches is a regional business, while a British bookmaker with a website is one of the dozen or so names anybody in the country can reel off.

High street bookmaking in Britain is a closed world if you are not standing in it. There is no Turkish equivalent of the licensed shop on every parade, and the online side that came later was geoblocked and licensed country by country, so a name like this reaches you as sponsor lettering around a darts stage on somebody else's television. That is the whole of my exposure to it.

Unibet Group bought the online business in September 2015, brand and technology together, for 19 million pounds. It kept running the site under the Stan James name for two and a half more years while it moved customers across. On 26 February 2018 the website was shut down and the remaining accounts were transferred onto Unibet, by then part of Kindred Group.

~ the chronicle ~

~ where the name came from ~

Stan is not a person. The company said the name was assembled out of Steve Fisher and his wife Anne, with James coming from the other partner, James Holder. It is the sort of origin story a small business tells once and never revisits, and it outlived both the shop estate and the website, since the thing that finally closed in 2018 was still carrying two first names belonging to people who set it up in 1973.

~ the sponsorship years ~

From 2000 to 2010 Stan James put its name on the World Matchplay, the summer darts tournament in Blackpool, for eleven consecutive years. It also sponsored the Guineas Festival at Newmarket from 2006 to 2010 and the King George VI Chase at Kempton Park from 2005 to 2008. That is a great deal of televised sport for a chain of fewer than a hundred shops, and it is the reason the name registers with people who never once opened an account.

~ the switch-off ~

Kindred spent that period buying brands and then reducing them to one. Stan James is the plainest instance. A name with four and a half decades behind it was acquired so that the customers attached to it could be moved onto a different platform, and it was switched off once they had been. The purchase covered the brand outright along with the accounts sitting on it.

stanjames.com still resolves. It answers with a permanent redirect to a Unibet page about Stan James, so the search traffic that 45 years of shop fronts and darts sponsorship built up keeps landing somewhere the buyer owns.

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