What’s in a Name?
For many years my business has been known as Gary Summerton Photography. I photographed many weddings, family, and senior high schools portraits. I also created portraits for executives, architectural, product, and some food photography. It was a lot of specialties to put on a business card or website. In early 2016 I decide it was time to narrow the focus of my business to just commercial photography. The goal is to build a new business model. It became pretty obvious that Gary Summerton Photography would no longer work with the new brand and identity. I thought this would be an easy process. It turned out to be a long and difficult process to arrive at ChromePie Studio as the new name of our business.
Many of you are wondering how did I come up with ChromePie? I went through several months of research from Black Dog Studios, to Harbor Falls Studios, C&M Photography. Then I tried researching different antique car names, no luck. All those cool names were all ready taken. It turns out all of the cool names are already taken. Next I tried coming up with different names from different languages around craftsman, artisan, and no luck. I even tried Gallic, my parents are Scottish. Ceardai I Thought was a winner. Only one problem most of the world has never heard of Ceardai and they can’t pronounce it or spell it. One day I was reading an article in Maine Magazine about a chef and her Restaurant called the Lost Kitchen. I had found nirvana; we would be the Lost Photographer. And for about six weeks I was the Lost Photographer until my wife found out. She thought it was the worst thing on earth to name a business the Lost Photographer. After some research she was right.
What do I do now? New business, no name. I felt like my new business was going down in flames before I could even launch it. My dear friend Maria Dailey saved the day. She sent me a link to a blog post on how to name a business. It states everything we have been taught about naming a business is wrong. The article is by Dave Mooring, owner of Super Simple Dave suggests starting your research with asking yourself these folowing questions:
Next Dave suggests getting paper and pencil start by making two columns on that sheet of paper. First column write down a list of descriptive words, colors, adjectives. In the next column write down names things places. Combine your lists. Nothing is off the table. I created my list. At one point I had Blue Sands photography. That was not going to work. While out playing golf with my son my mind wondered off to my list of words. That list included things I love to photograph. Metal, Chrome, Steel, Glass, Food, Pie, Baked goods and on and on the list reached 2 pages. The listed items are many of the products that I love to photography for my new business. Two words on my list came just seemed to work. ChromePie as one word combined. ChromePie describes two of the things I love to photograph the most Metal and Food. Next a quick Google search revealed the name and more importantly the domain name was available.
