What’s in a name

As my business has molded and shaped itself over the years, so too has our name.  It is not an easy thing to name a business at the beginning without knowing exactly where you will wind up.  So the progression of our name has been an interesting, not to mention confusing, journey.

Since we started out as a business that took old furniture and made it look new again, I thought that Before & After, LLC made a lot of sense.  Soon, however,  that was not all that we were selling…in addition to adding our word stones, we began to carve out a niche of selling beach themed accessories, taking advantage of our location in Annapolis and its waterfront location.  So when we went online, it made sense to add BeachDecor.net to our letterhead…making it simple for folks to remember our web address.

Then along came the stones and tokens and the beach decor slowly made its exit.  Selling word stones and pocket tokens under a name like BeachDecor.net just did not make sense…so here we are at CourageInStone.com.  I feel we’ve finally nailed it…mainly because we don’t have room for a 4th name on our marketing materials.

I have probably spent way more time worrying about our name then is warranted.  The great thing about having an online business is that it’s all about the search engines and the content of your website.  It’s very rare that people find us directly by our website address.  But when the name of my business does not match the product, I feel that the universe is a bit off kilter.

Have you ever named a website?  It is not as easy as it looks.  There are several main factors that you need to consider.  Length, in combination with ease of typing is a big one.  WordStones.com is great… WeSellAwesomeWordStonesandPocketTokens.com is not.  Another huge factor is whether the website address is for sale.  Just like everything else in the world, website addresses need to be purchased.  Someone may already have a website at the exact address you need.  Or, someone might own a website address without it even being live, sorta like owning real estate without building a house.  The property might be for sale, but at a marked up price.   A third factor that was necessary for me was that the name conveyed what we were about.   Limiting that to a simple, easy to type, available website address was tough.

Here in the office we brainstormed for several days and threw out a ton of names. We narrowed down the field to what we thought was a fabulous address. ScatterHope.com. But when we surveyed about 10 friends independent of each other, they all shot it down immediately. Disappointed, we went back to the drawing board – although we were very glad to have taken a survey because we obviously stunk at choosing names! Sitting at dinner one night, I was lamenting to my husband how difficult this task was. “Well, what do the stones do? What’s the biggest reason people by stones and tokens?” he asked. “I think mainly they give people courage – for whatever it is they are going through, good or bad.” I said.

Hmmm….courage in stones. CourageInStone.com

So here we are. And hopefully over the years our products have given plenty of courage, hope, strength and healing. And while I know the stones and tokens aren’t any of these things intrinsically, I do think that if you believe, they can create power and energy.