What Should I Name My Business?

For the first couple of years we were called Stella Accessories, a very original name inspired by our bulldog Stella and her new accessories. As i’m sure is the way in business often, we were forced to rebrand in mid 2020 after getting into a bit of a tussle with a much more well know ‘Stella’…I say tussle, it was more of a panic and runaway from this giant of a company! Literally overnight we changed name from Stella Accessories, to Stocky & Dee with some help from our creative consult Heather (my mother in law). 

Originally we were quite stressed about the prospect of changing names and we were determined that it had to be perfect and have some deep meaning and absolute relevance to our brand and our products. We researched ideas and sat brainstorming for hours, a good tip we were given was the ‘phone call test’, is it easy to hear when said over the phone and is it easy to spell after hearing it? Your typical dog relate words such as pooches, paws, pups and furry friends were thrown about until we thought, why? Does Apple sell fruit? Where did Google come from? Have you ever thought about how funny the name Orlando Bloom is? 

We began to realise that whatever we called our brand, as long as the product was good, it really didn’t matter and eventually it would just become a ‘noise’ that people associate with a product or logo. Generally, your first intention when hearing a company name isn’t to question its meaning is it? 

After this it made life a little easier and one of earliest suggestions ‘Stocky & Dee’ became the one for us. As we are a premium brand we thought the ‘x & x’ configuration had quite a classy ring to it so with this in mind we played around with it. Stocky (Stockbridge, Edinburgh where we are based now) and Dee (Royal Deeside where the company was founded)….simple. Perhaps we should have spelt it Stoki & Di or some other strange spelling, it seems to be the done thing in new businesses these days. 

After making sure this name was available on all social media channels and business registrations we went for it and Stocky & Dee was born. In hindsight we love the new name and we love what it’s done to our brand. We found the process of changing the name quite interesting after the original panic and as I say, does it really matter what you call your business? Another of the many lessons learned along the journey of starting and growing a young business, fingers crossed there will not be a second blog post on the same subject in the future! Of course it helps when your logo is the face of a gorgeous, regal and striking beast such as our Stella! (And no, the Stocky doesn’t refer to her build)