Showing posts with label names. Show all posts
Showing posts with label names. Show all posts

Sunday, April 26, 2009

There's No "Spur of the Moment" in Buisiness

I learned this the hard way.
I have had a shop on Etsy for over a year, and it's doing very well....I'm happy.
However there's always that little thing inside you that wants you to do something different than you normally do. For me, it's these little drawings of girls with kind of big ears (inspired by myself and my daughters that all live proudly with this trait). I wasn't, and still am not sure what to do with them, but I've been fiddling around with the idea of opening a second, completely different shop to put them in....whatever form I end up trying to sell them as.
On Saturday I had a bunch of time to myself and on the "spur of the moment" I went ahead and opened a second store. I had come up with a name, checked Etsy and it was available. While I was registering it, I decided on "the spur of the moment", to change the last letter from an s to a z. Much cooler (probably not cool anymore actually) that way, and I figured it would be uncommon that way.
I went to photoshop, made a banner, and even listed my first 3 items...cards. I felt accomplished.
For about 5 minutes.
I don't know what made me do it, but I googled my cool new shop name with a z, and .....HOLY CRAP!!! There was a boatload of listings....books...and other things. I guess this was the name of a character I had never heard about before.
Nothing to do about it, but empty my new Etsy shop and ask to have it closed. Which I did.
Lesson learned..research first. Spent the rest of the day eating chips.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

What's in a name?

Almost as hard to come up with as names for your children. Although occasionally, it seems like people just don’t want to think about it too much. I can remember being a kid and having a cat named Lucky, and then the next cat we got was also named Lucky. Ironically neither cat was.
We had a lab cross named Penny, and a beagle named Tammy. Both names that were considered for me apparently, but were given to dogs instead.
I can remember sitting around the kitchen table writing names on paper that would be chosen out of a bowl. That was for our black shepherd. I wrote Thor, a brother wrote Brutus, and he ended up being called Ben. That was a good name for him.
I had guinea pigs named Bubbles and Pickles, I have no idea why. I was a kid.
Since I got married and started my own family we have had a cat named Dickens, not after the writer, but because he was a dickens. Also a cat named Claude, because that was what you got when you went near him “Claw’d”. Our kids names their cat Skittles (why?) and our first dog a golden retriever was a purebred and so appropriately we named him Montgomery (Monty). Two rabbits, Magic (black) and Twister (because he would run and then jump up in the air and twist around, also the movie was a big hit at the time) Our current dog is Tira, named by our kids after some anime character.
I always think of good names, like Achilles, so I could say “Achilles heal! When we don’t have a pet to name, but when we do have a new one, it just seems so daunting to come up with the right one.