Name Matters: How We Chose Our Brand Name
When it came to choosing our brand name, we knew, at least, these four things:
Where: Andalusia, Spain.
What: a boutique where you´d want to linger.
Our target market: cultural tourists
What we wanted to sell: artisan made, quality products that reflect the cultural mix of Al-Andalus, but with a distintictive modern twist.
Business Name Ideas and The Magic Formula
And so we started the naming process. We started to think location, history and a name that could conjure this up.
The most Easterly provinces of Spain are often referred to as being of the levant, of the East. The Levant in the Middle East is from where the first conquerers of Al-Andalus hailed (today´s Syria). And el levante is the strong Saharan wind that sometimes blows here. There´s also a Lebanese restaurant in central London called Levant and subconciously, I think this had an influence, especially as I had spent so much of my career to date in the Lebanon. So we homed in on Levante, or El Levante, as our potential name.
Great, we´d nailed it, or so we thought.
There were lots of things happening at once: we were selling up our life in London and moving to Spain. We had started to pay rent on a premises (there wasn´t much going so when one became availalbe we snapped it up before we´d upped sticks). We also needed somewhere to live. While all this was going on we went about researching artisans and goods and, on a plane trip back to London, we started chatting with this English woman who had been living in the area for years. We filled her in with out business plans, including the name. "Ah yes!", she exclaimed, "El levante, the wind that makes people feel ill and gives everyone a headache."
This stopped us in our tracks. This was not good news. Not good news at all. It remined me of the Nova car marketing campaing that I´d learnt about in an evening marketing class: great sounding in English, new, fresh, different! Terrible in Spanish ("no va" means won´t go). Levante, our brand name of choice, is associated with feeling under the weather and out of sorts (and after years of living in Cadiz, we now know what she was talking about. We all dread the levante with it´s hot wind, allergies and mess). So after taking a deep breath, we decided to ditch the name and, in one fair exclamation, found ourselves back at square one.
A Change of Tack: Descriptive Names vs Abstract Names
Being at square one, again, is quite a daunting place to be (remember, this was before the advent of AI and business name generators, when we were forced to use our brains). It´s even more disheartening when you thought you´d leap frogged off square one, but then find that, in fact, you´d landed on the snake´s head and were forced to slither right back down to ground zero. We had names swirling around our heads for weeks, twisting the names on our tongues, but nothing felt or sounded right. We wanted to conjure up Al-Andalus without saying Al-Andalus. Andalusia without saying Andalusia. Hertiage without the word heritage. Modern without the word modern. Stylish without the word stylish. Should it be a descriptive name, an abtract name but also a catchy name? It needed to work across different languge barriers, a memorable name whose meaning was still crystal clear. So many questions - so few answers. We felt mentally exhausted, flat and our brains had turned to mush. Would we ever find that elusive iconic brand name?
And then Came the Eureka! Moment
After a day of more tongue-twisting, we flopped down in front of the evening news, our minds blank (I can, at least, vouch that my mind was blank). And then suddnely, as if out of nowhere, this word popped into my head: Andaluchic. Something had been going on in my subconcious, gleaning ideas and storing them away, although up to this point, it hadn´t felt like that all. I had a surge of excitement and quickly shared this business name idea with my husband. For once we were in total agreement (a rarity!): Andaluchic it was!
I got up to search for the domain availability, not a moment to lose: I felt confident as the name was a made-up word (wasn't it?)...steady on...hadn´t we been here before? Just stay calm. The domain, in all of it´s configurations, was, indeed, up for grabs. I quickly gobbled them up and the beginnings of Andaluchic was born.
The Visual Design
So we had the name that expressed our core business. Now we had to bring it to life. We were lucky enough to pull on the design talents of a graphic designer who had rented a room from us in London before moving back to her native France.
We played with tile designs in different colors, imagery representing the types of products sold and gradually a vision began to emerge.
Eventually we devised a 3 way color-scheme of grey (modern), bright red (Spanish) and white (clean and light) and gave life to a simple, clean font, depicted in grey, visually chopping up the brand name in two, by using the lighter and bolder font versions on each "word". A red fan icon was to replace the dot on the i of chic, to represent our Spanish identity.
To The Here and Now
17 years on and how has our brand name, Andaluchic, endured? Well, in between different configurations of us as people, years of trying for a family, severe, life-changing illness (one out of two of Team Andaluchic was, and remains, down), the final arrival of our miracle boy, closing the physical shop to cope with all the family changes and new caring responsibilities, opening up to the digital sphere and becoming an online business; after all of these changes and life´s ups and downs, Andaluchic is still here.
Was our approach to creating a brand name scientific? No, not really. Our gut, instinct, listening (the lady on the plane!) and unconsciously absorbing the many things and people around us, guided our journey.
Is there a better approach to finding a brand name? No doubt the experts will tell you so. Research, brainstorming, narrowing down words, differentiation, distinctiveness, target market, focus groups: you can follow it all but still come up with a blank, or worse, a dud (think the Nova!).
What the process did teach us however, is that your brain is busy doing things in the background, even when your conscious brain thinks that nothing is happening at all. Don´t give up, keep turning those ideas over in your head and keep looking around you to see what else is out there for inspiration. Just suck it all up and eventually, a recipe, your own unique recipe, will emerge.
Incidentally, a new hotel has opened in our li´l white town of Arcos de la Frontera. And the name? El Levante. It hasn´t flown off the cliff, looks very stylish and no, we haven´t breathed a word.
If you´re in the process of creating your own brand name, or are simply interested in the ideas behind creating one, read this informative and vibrant article by Zinzin about made-up brand names (right up our street!):
https://love.andaluchic.com/invented-brand-names
In this article, Best Life finally sorts out how to really pronounce those brand names that you were never quite sure about (we know were you´re coming from! We like the soft "chic" of the French for Andaluchic, as opposed to the hard "ch" delivered in Spanish...ahh well...):
https://love.andaluchic.com/mispronounced-brand-names
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