I was recently driving up to Virginia by way of always picturesque and interesting Eastern North Carolina backroads, when I came upon a sign, “Larry’s Cricket Ranch” and I thought, what a brilliant name… for these little chirpers… in hopes of hooking your prized Bass or a Crappie or two!! And the name just makes you smile…. or think. But definitely more than a subconscious read.
So I was driving and thinking now, about what owners, creatives or employees, put into their business names. Flying Olive Farms is our import company, with most of our imports being Greek Goods. We pondered going with an old standby such as Iliad Imports, LLC… or a famous Greek name or muse or god, plus the literal word of what we are about… being “imports”… But instead we chose Flying Olive Farms, to represent our Company Name. We wanted to push our creative boundaries and sort of show a little more of our impending personality. Flying Olive Farms, with our more progressive choices, such as sustainability, giving back and social/environmental accountability, added with our authentic age proven craft of healthy, pure and top quality Greek Goodness products, from the Greek Farms to you, lended us more of an explanation of our company, in being that we wanted to show off our more informal description and that we aren’t going to limit our thoughts or products with our import/export/product innovation company. We want to bring authentic and healthy products to our consumers dinner table, the unadulterated ones found when in Greece.
This was a long process coming up with our company name, brand names, trademark approvals, etc. There are so many thoughts and perfect names but maybe the URL is taken, or the trademark comes back risky or the name is already being used for something else… there are so many obstacles and roadblocks when naming a company I have found. Fun facts- there are over 2.5 million active trademarks in the U.S. alone, and over 13 million globally with 108 million URLs registered globally. Then consider that there are around 250,000 words in the English language with not all of these being usable as a brand or company name. We found, after months of exhaustion, that almost every word in every major language has been trademarked. Someone, somewhere, owned the names we wanted for our branded products or brand name!
Seeing as all the words have been taken, new companies are having to invent or spell differently words that are wanted for names. Take Tumblr and Flickr, leave a letter out of your concept word for whatever hurdle faced, but still the minds responds well and comprehends brand identity.
Some companies simply make up words…yipit, groupon, mashable… they work! I believe Blackberry got its name as the keys looked like “seeds”… Apple? In Steve Jobs biography, Jobs told Walter Isaacson he was “on one of my fruitarian diets” and had just come back from an apple farm, and thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”
Did you know that Google got its name through a typo? They decided to change the name to Googol (A googol is very large number: 10^100 to be exact) but when they registered the domain they typed Google! The rest is history.
Yahoo got its name through the acronym “Yet another hierarchical officious oracle”
And what about Bing! Although there’s no confirmation from Microsoft on this, many people believe that Bing is an acronym also: Because It’s Not Google.
It seems creativity is the key, mixed with a little luck and simply doing what works. It will be interesting to see the future of brand and company names.
On a side note, we haven’t shared with your our BRAND NAME. Follow us as we introduce this brand name on a few of Greece’s finest products, which are all proven healthy, authentic and natural. Because you may not always be eating what you think you are. (olive oil is the most corrupt food category in the world) So, with us, you can be rest assured on health, taste and accountability.
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and our Blog. We want your opinion on some things and would like you to have a chance to try our brands. Our website is in the making but start with us here— https://www.facebook.com/FlyingOliveFarms
Stay tuned for our Brand Name and keep up with us to let us know what you think, and for our awesome contests and giveaways.
What’s in a name for your or how did you come up with your name? We’d love to hear your story. Oh, and please re-post, retweet and comment. We love to be social. 🙂
OPA! Salute! Cheers! ….for now…..