Quick Review, My Votes on Current Recs, Some Thoughts
Can't say I'm a fan of any of the options listed in the question. They don't strike me as either particularly professional, or in any way relevant to the business at hand. Neither of those things (professional veneer, relevancy to your business) may be priorities, in which case my opinion on this matter is about as valuable as it is on just about any other matter... so there you have it.
The recommendations so far sort of fall into a few categories. Among those, these caught my eye:
- Bigo's Holster Emporium / Bigo's Leatherworks / some variation of your existing online identity combined with a description of your wares
- Rocket City Holsters / Rocket City Leatherworks
Hunstville Holsters / Huntsville Leatherworks
HHH - forget what the third H was for
- Big O (as distinct and separate from Bigo) with the whole sex sells approach
- Your Name, or any variation of naming convention that includes your last name
- Either I haven't seen one yet, or it didn't grab me when I saw it, but best defined as "something with a catchy ring to it that can easily be combined with an easily identifiable logo". In this case, things like 3D "holsters" or "leatherworks" or HHH or things that can easily be translated into a graphic ... become more attractive if you are willing to commit to any graphic/logo to such an extent that you would include it on virtually every item you craft for sale
Voting on existing recommendations within this thread, my preferences would be:
1.
Your name. Your real name. Just your name, nothing else. No descriptors (except perhaps as a subtitle).
- Simple. Elegant. Easy to understand. Undeniably tied to you (not the city, not the state, not some other dude whose business is similarly named. Not under copyright to anyone else. Not requiring explanation.
-usable to "brand" any work effort you ever plan to do during your entire life. Today, holsters. Tomorrow... belts. 3 years from now... custom electric guitars. 10 years from now, the sky is the limit. Logarithmically growable without being even the tiniest bit pretentious.
-Makes a clear statement without requiring the legal papers (but do them anyway!) later to communicate to your future employees, collaborators, etc. just exactly who it is that "owns" or "is" this business. Any conversation about who wears the pants or makes the decisions or drives the vision, can be resolved by simply pointing to the name on the door, the name on the product, you get the picture.
-as free to roam the planet along with you, should you ever move, as you could ever want.
2.
Bigo's ___________ (insert Holsters, Leatherworks, Emporium,
Backstop, something else)
- I like this because you have an existing (however small at the moment) identity and business already built. Maybe you've sold 5 or 10 holsters so far... but the existing customer base is nothing to sneeze at. We've heard of you, seen your product, and are both interested in the story from a compadre point of view/human interest story and of course as a potential future supplier of what we would consider to be a high quality product. It may not strike you as particularly clever or exciting, and I bet you weren't thinking longevity of this magnitude when you came up with the handle... but thinking purely mathematically, I urge you to grab a pen, check the current subscriber numbers, compare them to the views/reads on threads where you have talked about making custom holsters and the actual sales from customers you got through this site... and just predict for a moment what your reasonable, viable sales statistics are based on the existing "Bigo" name. You might be surprised.
3. If you just really kinda don't want to make the handle "Bigo" live on...you like it but maybe not that much. Now is the perfect time to reflect on what would be a cool, eternally loved by you, identity for yourself. (E.g., Robert Redford never got tired of being called the Sundance Kid, however just about everyone ever called Superman got pretty freaking tired of that...) It would be a much simpler thing to talk to the powers that be here on Defensive Carry (and any other sites you frequent) and just have your handle changed to the identity you choose NOW to live on as your business name or an identity closely associated with your business. From that moment on, all your prior posts discussing your journey into holster making can be viewed by future readers as this new identity. You wouldn't need train future buyers regarding the name change. (existing customer base probably are fanatically following along.)
-I'm guessing your "four eyes" idea falls into this category. I personally didn't like this one just because, being a glasses (or contacts, sometimes) wearer, it has built in negative connotations for me. Some folks are able to take the terminally uncool and just, make it cool. I'm just not one of those people. If there's some feature that you think makes you distinctly you (including your glasses), and you are down with that, by all means run with it. If it's not something that you seriously dig (and I mean, "rock on, bruttha" dig) about yourself, don't go with that one.
3.
Rocket City Leatherworks.
-You are just, just starting out. Going for "leatherworks" now is a better bet than losing marketshare later because people looking for either ready-made or custom-made somethings that involve leather later. For example, you started out making holsters because there was an expressed demand that convinced you to get into the supply business. Choosing "leatherworks" is just a good business decision, enabling you to offer custom anything - send me your ideas! on your site. If things go well enough, those products can become part of your product line. 'nuff said. Maybe not. I would not recommend taking this idea and running with it to the extreme, e.g. "Rocket City Leatherworks Universe" or something pretentious and unbelievable. Not to mention that, with that particular example, the juxtaposition of "mappable geographic location point" with "everything else" is kinda silly.
-nice that you could design, or have someone design, a funky rocket logo. The rocket, or a distinctly "rocket city" eg., building, skyscraper, something else) could be a sales draw either for sheer coolness, or create a built-in base for (likely non-holster, but you never know) souvenir type local sales.
What I don't like about using "Rocket City"?
- searches for you might get hogged up in the cloud with results that are relevant to the city, and not to you. Getting your links high enough in search results could end up being prohibitively expensive. I haven't checked it, just a thought.
-Ties you to a particular location. You're young, just starting out. What happens if you fall in love with a (rocket scientist, oil exploration geologist, rock/movie star, some other person who is geographically tied by virtue of their career to a place that is defined simply as "not rocket city"). Do you have to choose between them, and your business, or between them and renaming your business?
Non vote comments.
-I would steer clear of defining your business along sexual lines. Unless you seriously want to be in the sex implement and gadget business. In which case, that's probably your best bet naming wise. For a female gun owner perspective, and someone watching how female gun ownership is trending upwards at a rate that protection businesses are currently clamoring (and skidding) to catch up with, I would recommend that anything which could be termed as exploitive in any way even conceptually could cause a serious negative drive for your revenue directions. Whereas, designing things which are female friendly, and keeping your business professional and non-gender specific overall, could potentially have a better impact on your business than those sales which would come in from guys who think about guns & girls together when making purchase decisions (probably defined as the single/divorced/unhappily married crowd. Arguably, not a small segment. Any man trying to address the "getting my wife/girl on board with the gun thing" will probably react, however, in a decidedly different manner to sexually driven ads which he thereby cannot share with his wife/girlfriend. Can't speak for any of those men, on either fence, being a woman. But as a woman, a gun owner, and a person in a romantic relationship, even if the execution of the naming/advertising were well crafted, I'd probably steer clear and focus my attention on what I would consider "serious" suppliers of protection equipment.
I happen not to be a fan of the "hunstville" category of names, for the same reasons I had against Rocket City. Only, the good parts of Rocket City don't apply to "hunstville". There's no immediately imaginable graphic to go with that (except a cow brand for 3 Hs, for example, and 3 Hs in a row are not meaningful except in terms of what each means in this particular brand name. Which to a person in, say, Florida, is exactly nothing. On an actual cow, likely to be found in a geographical range within fair distance of a 3H ranch, 3H makes sense. For a potentially international company, unless those 3Hs tie into a fairly universal concept which I don't know about, it doesn't make real sense. to me. Now, this would not apply if the place name in the 3
was "new york" or "la" or arguably even "seattle" or "dallas" or "miami". Again, being "huntsvile", a city without (to my own experience) a national or international identity/brand, I'm not sure this name would be valuable beyond the fairly limited geographical area. Then again, you could be the business that puts Huntsville on the map. (At one time, Champagne was just a village somewhere in France. And a Philly Cheese Steak was once just meat and cheese on a bun. Who else remembers when there was no such thing as a "Buffalo Wing", and people as a rule didn't eat wings? You never know. To steal a line from Dr. Seuss: "Oh, the places you'll go.")
I like sine wave because it is smart and clever. I don't like sine wave because it is smart, clever, probably will need to be explained to a huge body of people, and doesn't have an easily identifiable way to be turned into a graphic. For the "easy to understand" and "easy to translate into a logo" reasons, I'd suggest that you eliminate any name words that your average 6th grader doesn't already know. If you want to aim a little higher, maybe make that 10th grader. Words like "emporium" work because they are in the names of children's books and kids (and thereby, former kids) "get" the idea that an Emporium is a "place where you can get your heart's desire". Kids and most former kids... maybe vaguely remember something incomprehensible from physics class that involved the word "sine", and will shiver unavoidably as a result. But then again, maybe that's me. If you really, really want "sine wave" then I would recommend that you do something along the lines of the band "R.E.M." where the name of the band is an easy to remember acronym, and those who deomonstrate interest and initiative can go learn something utterly cool about what's going on in science today by looking up the meaning. (other evidence of coolness in naming of this sort: U2, B-52s, Foo Fighters.....)
I've gone on long enough. Just one last word to say:
Rock On, Brutha!