A little story behind ONYCHEK branding
ONYCHEK, ONYE CHEK, ONEE CHEK? These are different ways people try to pronounce the name. I correct them though- it is pronounced UH KNEE CHECK.It’s not been quite an issue for me because all my life, my names have been hard to pronounce by different people. After attempting many times to correctly pronounce the company name, the next question that comes out of them is, “What does it mean?” And the simple response is, “I named it after my dad’s company.” That is the short answer. A true answer. But it still doesn’t answer the question of what it actually means. This short post is my attempt to answer this question.
As I said earlier, I did name the company after my dad’s company, ONCHEK, because of many reasons. I’ve always wanted to be like dad. When I was young, people called me ONCHEK Jnr. I mean, my first gmail email address is onchek@gmail.com, and I opened this account ~ 10 years ago, way before I thought of starting a company. I also wanted a name that would remind me of my roots. Something that will remind me of me. Remind of the future I am trying to build. And ONYCHEK, I believed, was is the right name for it. BTW the gmail account is still active anyway, so feel free to reach out to me.
You might have thought that I had a typo, ONCHEK, in my dad’s company name. No. You saw it right. There is no “Y” in dad’s company name. I added this to be a little different while still being the same. To show a reverse- dad imported textile from China to Nigeria, and I want to reverse that. To remind me of my startup journey.
Well what does ONCHEK mean? It happened that in the mid 1980s there was a business naming bug in south eastern Nigeria, where business owners named their company by getting creative with their own names- first, middle and last names , if they have all three. Think about the naming bug in the mid 2000s when almost every new silicon valley company had to remove a vowel- Do any companies ring a bell? Flickr, Srsly. Or when it was all about the “fys” and “lys”.Think of Contently, Bitly, Shopify, Billify, Storify. And I just discovered, “Distractify” .. what??? But you get the story- we too had a that bug then. In regards to that of my parents’ time, it was chopping up name until one sounded good enough to print on a letter head. So dad went to work. Who knows how many names he came up with before choosing this one. I can only wonder. I haven’t asked him, although I could just text him on WhatsApp right now. I won’t.
You see, my dad’s full name is Okafor Nwokocha Chekwas (Chekwas short for Onwuchekwa- Bob is to Robert as Chekwas is to Onwuchekwa). You probably are already seeing the pattern. He used the O from Okafor, N from Nwokocha, and Chek from Chekwas = ONCHEK. Actually that is a pretty good name. It meets the criteria set by company naming experts- 2–3 syllabi at most. Easy to pronounce. Catchy. Piques interest. Sounds cool. He actually did a great job. There you go, yet again, he did the work for me. I just copied it and added a “Y”- that was the most creative I could get. ONYCHEK is also always all caps because, yes you guessed it, that’s how dad had his.
Remember I said that the company naming bug was going around. It really was. I had uncles with company names, BENON, NOMSAK. All short. All 2–3 syllabi. All a mix and match of their personal names.
Logo
First, my logo wasn’t inspired by dad’s. I can take a little more credit for this one. ONYCHEK is a company that is focused on Africa, fashion, luxury, so our logo had to embody all these aspects. To incorporate all these different aspects of the business, Jan (designer behind ONYCHEK brand) and I set out to use the Ghanaian Adrika symbols. These symbols were used by the Ashanti to tell stories by printing them on clothing or art work.Each design meant something. You can learn more about the Adrinka symbol here.
Among the symbols, we tried out different styles below:
To come up with different designs below
We ended up choosing this..
And this
Why?
Leadership
We chose to use the Adrinkahene symbol, which means leadership, charisma, and greatness.
You see, we want to lead this African luxury industry. We want to lead the revolution around fashion made in Africa. We want to lead in the best place to work. This was why the Adrinkahene symbol resinated with us.
Focus
The symbol also looks like a bulls eye, which, to me, means focus. We have a hard task ahead of us, and we have to manically focus on what problems we are solving to make the most impact on Africa.
Minimal
The logo was also easy to the eye. Not too edgy. It is welcoming. The center of the circles draws ones eyes into the logo. Our other samples, though cool looking, seemed too edgy.
At ONYCHEK, we try as much as possible to be thoughtful in our execution, as we are a missionary company. We ask ourselves, what will this mean to our customers? How will this positively affect Africa? We have our eye on the big picture. The long hard road. We try to exemplify this in our actions and this branding wasn’t an exception.