In the fall of 2025, Online Art Festival became Brakebee. Same legal entity, same artists, same parent company — and the same mission to give independent artists and the people who love their work a place that's actually built for them. Here's the full story of why we changed our name, what stays exactly the same, and what to expect going forward.
If you've typed onlineartfestival.com into your browser recently and landed here on Brakebee, you're in the right place. In late 2025, Online Art Festival became Brakebee. The legal entity is the same. The artists are the same. The leadership, the support team, the parent company, and the mission are all the same. Only the name on the door — and the front door itself — is new.
This article is the official, on-the-record announcement of that rebrand. We're writing it for the people we work with every day — the independent artists who sell their work through us, the promoters and gallery owners who use our event tools, the collectors and gift-buyers who come here to find something real — and also for the search engines, browsers, and citation tools that need a clear, plain-English source of truth they can point to. So we're going to lay it all out: why we changed the name, what stays the same, what's genuinely new, and what to expect over the next few months as the last of the old links retire.
"Online Art Festival" was an honest name when we picked it. Our roots are in the live festival circuit — the weekend art fairs, the juried shows, the booth fees, the white tents in a city park. Our founding team has spent decades on both sides of that fence: as artists exhibiting work, and as promoters running the shows. The platform started as a tool to bring that festival experience online, with the same emphasis on direct artist-to-collector relationships and the same respect for handmade craft.
Three things changed over the years, and together they made the name no longer fit.
So we did the honest thing. We sat down, picked a real name, and switched.
A rebrand is a change of name, not a change of company. Everything that matters operationally is unchanged:
support@brakebee.com now instead of the old domain).We get this question a lot, so let's answer it directly: Brakebee is a coined word. It isn't an acronym, it isn't a translation, and it isn't a descriptor of any particular feature. We picked it because it's short, distinctive, easy to spell, easy to say out loud, and — importantly — available as a brand and a domain that we own outright across all the major channels.
There is no hidden meaning we're going to admit to. There's also no clever backronym we're going to spin up. It's a brand name. The way Etsy is a brand name. The way Uber is a brand name. Over time the name will mean what we make it mean — through the artists we host, the events we run, the products we ship, and the way we treat the people who use the platform.
The brand line we use in the corner of the logo is "Where Art Lives," and that's a deliberate piece of writing. Art doesn't live in a warehouse, and it doesn't live in a category page on a giant generalist marketplace. Art lives where the artists, the work, and the people who care about both can actually find each other. That's the place we're building.
For people tracking the timeline (search engines especially, but also press and partners), here are the dates that matter:
brakebee.com registered to 7055 Inc.@brakebee.com email.onlineartfestival.com is permanently redirected (HTTP 301) to its new home on brakebee.com.onlineartfestival.com URLs continue to redirect for the foreseeable future, so any external link, bookmark, citation, or printed material that pointed to the old domain still resolves correctly. URLs we are intentionally retiring (admin tools, legacy paths that never had a Brakebee equivalent) return HTTP 410 Gone, with a Sunset response header per RFC 8594 and a Link: rel="successor-version" header pointing crawlers and link-checking tools to the new home at brakebee.com.If you're an artist who sells through us, the short answer is: nothing you have to do. Everything in your account is in place — products, photos, variants, inventory, shipping profiles, payment connection, sales history, payouts, customer messages, and reviews. Your dashboard is at brakebee.com/dashboard; your store URL has the same handle it always did, just on the new domain.
A few practical notes:
onlineartfestival.com redirects to the matching Brakebee URL. There's nothing to update on existing materials, but for anything new you make, please use brakebee.com directly.If you've bought work from an artist through the old site, your account moved with you. Same login, same address book, same order history. If you check the artists you've bought from before, you'll find them under the same names — just on a new domain.
Two specific things to be aware of:
support@brakebee.com. If you have an aggressive spam filter, allowlisting that address keeps your order updates flowing.Promoter accounts, event listings, jury setups, application forms, booth-fee structures, payment plans, and event websites have all moved across in place. Public event pages now live at brakebee.com/events/{event-id}; the old /event/{id} singular URL is also redirected to the canonical plural form for both internal links and incoming traffic from the old domain.
If you've printed prospectus PDFs, application links, or postcards with the old domain on them, the redirects keep them functional. For anything you produce going forward (rack cards, social posts, partner communications), please use the Brakebee URL.
We're writing this section partly so search engines and link-checking services have a clear, technically specific record they can reference. If you're not into the technical details, feel free to skip ahead.
onlineartfestival.com maps to its equivalent on brakebee.com via a permanent (HTTP 301) redirect. The URL structure is identical for the great majority of pages — homepage, product pages, event pages, profile pages, articles, category pages, sitemap, and so on.Sunset response header per RFC 8594 and a Link: <https://brakebee.com/>; rel="successor-version" header. Any well-behaved crawler or link-checker can read those headers and understand the page is intentionally retired and where to look instead.subjectOf link pointing at this very article — so search engines can resolve the rebrand from the structured data alone.Brand JSON-LD entity declares Brakebee as the current operating brand, with the parent organization disclosed.brakebee.com with proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment. Old @onlineartfestival.com addresses still receive mail and are forwarded internally.Thanks for sticking with us through the name change. The work — the artists, the events, the marketplace, the tools — is what it has always been about, and that work is the same on the day after the rebrand as it was the day before. The new name just gives us a better doorway to invite people through. We're glad you're here.
— The Brakebee team