What’s in a name?
Shakespeare once said, “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet”
While we agree that a startup’s product is the truest indicator of its value, we also realise that Einsite does not have that universal brand-recall and recognition that a rose has.
When my brother, (and Co-Founder) Rajiv, and I began our branding exercise, we decided we wanted our name & logo to strongly connote:
(1) Intelligence & (2) Construction.
For a long time, we used ‘Insite’ as a working title for our product, because it just made so much sense for us. It hints at the ‘insights’ that we provide about construction project ‘sites’! It would’ve been a perfect name for our company, if not for the fact that it was in common use by a whole host of startups, corporations and organisations.
So even if we weren’t particular about trademark-ability, we knew we definitely needed a single-word name that could be easily Googled.
For this, we would probably have to make up our own word. Easier said than done! We started with combinations of multiple words that signified what we were working on, but ended up with names that were either overused or kitschy. We also didn’t want to go with those meaningless, goofy-sounding words that have become oh so common with startups.
Finally, after embarrassingly long, it occurred to me that by adding an ‘e’ before ‘insite’, we’d end up with a unique name that strongly connotes both insight and site. As a bonus, it also sounds serendipitously similar to the name of my favourite scientist-thinker-philosopher!
So Einsite it was!
Name in hand, we then spent some time on the logo. We wanted a graphic that hints at all the connotations of Einsite, and we worked with a small, but incredibly creative branding team in Mumbai to come up with the final result
What did we hope to evoke through our logo? Many things at once!
For colour choice, we had decided even before we started the process, that it had to be Teal — the perfect blend of blue (corporate reliability) and green (refreshing energy).
Next, we came up with a graphic that contained multiple meanings related to different aspects of our name, product and company:
- Waves: EM waves used by all wireless electronics
- Space: Curvature of space-time from Einstein’s General Relativity
- Contours: Maps used by the construction and mining industries
Since we’ve adopted this name and logo, we constantly meet people who ask us what they mean, and some who even venture a guess. What we find absolutely delightful, is that a large portion of them actually come up with different, creative interpretations that we didn’t really intend.
Albert Einstein too was famed for his creative genius, which enabled him to dream up a vision of the entire universe, all while sitting alone in a patent office. We hope that all the people who join our team or use our product, are similarly charged with a bolt of creative imagination! :)
