Changing Company Name: Lessons Learned
Changing the name of your company sounds easy, but it can turn into an exhausting struggle. We’ve pulled through this during our first year. Looking back, what did we learn?
Back in February 2017, Lab of New was born. Experimentation in tech, design and business is the heartbeat of why we as a company exist. The concept of lab felt like a beautiful way to distill our approach to creating digital services. Over the first few months, we grew into loving and using the name ourselves. People close to us started calling us “People from LoN”.
The first sign that our birth name may not work as we visioned came from field testing outside of Finland. To the average native English speaker, the name sounded somehow awkward and naive. They would have preferred “New Lab”, which would have had the same feeling of exploration and experimentation in it. To us, it sounded bland and it was already reserved.
We sat down and asked ourselves the uncomfortable question: “is our name so bad that we want to change it”? The more we mulled over it, the more hesitant we became. The associations of the word “lab” felt strong to us, but could we improve on the clumsiness of the expression? Even if we found a way to put it as a native would, could it still paint a too one-dimensional picture of us as propellerheads in white coats? Would it communicate that business, too, is a core skill for us? Is it clear that the bulk of what we do is consultation work and not research & development?
Nearly all of us agreed these were things that we couldn’t turn a blind eye to. We asked our branding specialist friend at Reaktor for help in coming up with some fresh ideas for a new name, and he delivered. We scrutinised the list of new name candidates, but none of them struck us as something exceptionally good that we would be happy with.
At this point, we came up with a haphazard plan: Everyone could brainstorm ideas for a new name at their own pace. After some weeks of brainstorming, we’d pick a new name together that everyone feels at ease with. At the time, We were less than 10 people strong and having everyone’s opinion democratically heard seemed like a noble, plausible idea.
After killing everyone’s name candidate darlings for a couple of rounds, we were left with a handful of names we couldn’t all agree on. There was Avenew, which started to sound like a cologne that just hit the market. For Finns, LeapLab sounded like moving water. Could Uus.io have had long-term viability apart from its trendiness? Hardly. Falling back to the old name felt just as impossible. In our minds, it was long gone due to the negative meanings we had piled on it. We were stuck in a dead-end, and turning back was too late.
We learned a lesson the hard way. Two things were vital if we ever wanted a new name. First, we had to set a clear deadline for the naming work. Second, the task of coming up with a new name suggestion should be done by a group that’s small enough to avoid decision paralysis. Most importantly, everything had to be carried through with a lot of rigour and decisiveness.
Four of us formed a small team to work on the new name. We felt that a fresh start was needed, so we decided to abandon all the candidates up to that point and began from scratch. Together, we set deadlines and checkpoints for the first time in the name change process. Our final deadline was a mere month away when the work began. We wanted to reveal the new name as a highlight at the annual company summer party.
As our work began, we quickly learned another lesson: Being creative and meeting deadlines will clash — hard. Ideally, we wanted the new name to pop up spontaneously. Our creative brainstorming would set the baseline, and the best candidate would present itself in time. As we were under a strict deadline, time was a luxury we didn’t have. We were forced to try to be as creative as we could in the short time we had.
In the end, our small team came through with several worthwhile names in a matter of two weeks. We quickly learned that even though brainstorming for names is mentally exhausting, it’s not the most time-consuming part of the process. Following up on promising candidates took the bulk of time. For every name, we had to scourge the web and various registries for competitors with similar names. When no matches in our field of business were found, we still had to check for availability of domain name variations and deal with domain squatters whenever needed.
At our summer party in August, we revealed our suggestion for a new name: New Things Company, or New Things Co for short. Several people had been blissfully in the dark about what the name would turn out to be. The welcome varied from the encouraging “this is much better than before” to the disillusioned looks of “you can’t be serious!” Our presentation was supported by material outlining the conceptual thinking behind the new name and visualised examples of how the new name could work in the real world.
As the day turned to night, the name kept popping up in casual conversations over good food and drinks. Little by little, people started feeling at ease with the newcomer. Respecting the Finnish tradition, the decision to go with New Things Company was made on the benches of sauna late at night.
Over the next few weeks, we grew into using the new name internally. Before we could go public with the new name, we had a massive list of things to do. Again, we learned that the work ahead of us would take much longer than expected. All of our brand-related visuals had to be redesigned. We needed to come up with a plan on how to communicate the name change to clients that we work with.
Practicalities aside, we learned something important about naming and language in general: No matter who you ask, every word and phrase is loaded with subjective meanings. Trying to please everyone is a road that never ends. A company name, be it make-believe or not, is a container that everyone has filled with something positive or negative. It’s up to everyone of us at New Things Company to reinvent that meaning through the way we talk, write, act, and play with others.
Long live New Things Co!
