Ello Mixup
This is the logo of Ello.com, a Michigan retailer, not Ello.co, the social media network. Ello.com

Ello is the hot new social media startup everyone’s savviest friends are scrambling to join. Based at Ello.co, the minimalist social network is being billed by some as the anti-Facebook, a Twitter minus the constant scrolling feed, the site that won’t collect your data or try to sell you stuff based on your Web history.

Ello Corporation, on the other hand, is a three-employee retailer based on Bluebush Road in Monroe, Michigan, 40 miles south of Detroit on the banks of Lake Erie. With a URL of Ello.com, it’s a mostly online operation that sells about $500,000 worth of caffeine pills, diet aids, nutritional supplements and other products each year, according to its founder and owner, Mark Brant.

Ello was just the little-known home of Brant’s business for the past 30 years, but that’s all changed since the other Ello started blowing up over the past week. Ello.com has become a hot online destination through no effort of Brant or his brother Gary, who serves as the company’s office manager. They say they’ve been inundated with people looking for information or help related to the Ello social network.

“We’re just getting a lot of traffic that’s not ours,” Gary Brant told International Business Times on Friday. “I’m getting all kinds of questions about people who can’t log on, or who want to partner with Ello or something, and it’s obviously not going to the right place. … It’s thousands of emails. I’ve cleared out at least 300 this morning.”

The mixup has been quite the headache for the Brants, who say they are ignoring the emails and compiling them in a dedicated folder. But the brothers don’t blame the thousands of people who have mistakenly messaged them.

“Most people are used to writing .com, and muscle memory and autofill may be making it so they are going to .com instead of .co,” Gary Brant said. “It might not be their fault at all; maybe autofill is filling it out as .com.”

Despite the minor annoyance of sifting through hundreds of unwanted emails each day, there may be a silver lining to the whole situation, according to Mark Brant. He said the company would be more than willing to sell the Ello.com URL to the social network for the right price.

“[They’d need to] make an offer high enough that would make it worthwhile to sell the URL name,” he said. “We’ve been contacted three or four times over the last year to sell the name, but we don’t know if Ello sent those people to contact us or if it was someone else.”

The other Ello did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.