How to choose the right name for your company Part II – Practicing What I Preach

Last month I wrote an article for BizNess Magazine on how to choose the right name for your business. In this months issue I followed up on this article. Read below.

Soon after I wrote the article for the previous issue I got involved in a new business venture, opening a wine store in Ramat Bet Shemesh. Part of my tasks was to come up with the best name and the logo for the company. In today’s article I will walk you through what I did and show you the results.

The first step was to choose a proper name for the company.

We had to keep in mind a couple of things. The first is our target market both from launch and for the future. Even though the store is opening in Ramat Bet Shemesh, I needed to keep in mind that we may be opening others stores in different areas in the future as well as have an online presence. In addition we will be offering other services such as corporate wine and cheese events, gift baskets and delivery service and well as tours to wineries across the country. So the name could not be a local sounding name.

In addition the name needed to either sound good in both English and Hebrew our needed to translate very well. And of course we needed to have a domain name and social media branding that connects everything.

Choosing the Name

The first thing you want to do is see what is out there and grab ideas from people just to sort of get a feel for what is out there. Below are a few of the steps I took:

• Did a search on Google for “Best Wine Stores” and “Top Wine Stores”. I wanted to see what were the type of names top wines stores were using
• Placed a post on NamePros.com domain name forum asking domainers for the perfect name. I was willing to either purchase the name for them, or if they suggested a name to me that was not yet registered I would pay them a $50.00 bounty. I got about 60 names from this one post.
• Started typing in all sorts of wine related names into Dynadot.com, a domain registrar I use. They have a domain suggestion box which tells you some available domains based on the keywords you enter

So as I came up with ideas or pulled them from the resources above I made a list of the top names I liked. Once I narrowed the list down to about 7-8 names I sent them out to my partners for feedback. I already knew the name I liked best from the list and when one of my partners also liked it, it sort of rose to the top of the list and as we debated the other names we finally chose the one which became our name and brand which is “Cellar 18”. The runner up was Vintage 18 which we all really liked, but we nixed it because 1) there is already an Israeli wine company running a website at Vintage.co.il and secondly because vintage in Hebrew is not a very common word.

“Cellar” obviously comes from Wine Cellar, but I also like that it is a subliminal meaning of “seller”, that we sell wines. The “18” comes from “Chai” life and to make a l’Chaim. The Hebrew word for Cellar is Hamartif, which also fit very well. It is short, memorable and classy. The perfect name we were looking for.

And of course we got all the domain names and important social media links to protect our brand:

• www.Cellar18.com
• www.Cellar18.co.il
• www.facebook.com/cellar18
• www.twitter.com/cellar18

Some of the names that we came up with that we did not choose were:

• Vintage 18
• 12 Tribes Wines
• Oak 18
• Blue Vine Wines
• The Vine Stop
• Geshem Wines
• Shefa Wines
• Kadosh Wines

So now that we had the perfect name, we now needed the perfect logo. I knew that to get something classy we had to spend a bit of money and I did not want to stick with just one designer to work with. There are many “logo contest” sites out there where designers compete by designing your logo for a cash prize. One of the top sites for this is 99designs.com, but I decided to go with a bit of a smaller player called Hatchwise.com. I had a budget of about $350.00, but I take pride in always trying to be able to come under budget while not affecting the quality in any way.

We received 84 Entries. As the entries come in, I am able to rank them from 1-5 and that way keep track of the logo’s I like best. Out of the 85 I probably discarded 60% of them at first look, but that still left us with about thirty logo’s to consider. You are able to request unlimited changes to the logo’s from the designers. One of the first entries I liked right away, and in the end it was actually the one we chose. Below are some of the options we liked:

The very first entry we got was this:

Right away I liked the one in the bottom left corner, but it needed some tweaking so I asked him to make the bottle round and he sent me this:

Now we were on to something! But I told him that we needed some Red color in it and I wanted the bottle to point the other way, so he sent me what became the logo we chose which is:

And we absolutely love it! Total cost came under $280 including prize and site listing fees.

But now that we have the perfect logo, there is still one minor issue. We are in Israel! And the official language is Hebrew! So we needed a Hebrew version of our new logo. So I went to a very talented graphic artist named Navit Mendelovici. We were in a huge rush and I went to her about 10:30pm and we finished about an hour later and She did an amazing job! You can see her work below:

and here it is in just the Hebrew version:

So now you know exactly the process I took to came up with the name and branding of Cellar 18. You can see from my previous article that I do indeed practice what I preach  

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