Where do they come from? Why are they important? Why are we Graphite Lab? I have answers.
Names are an important part of business. They can communicate your mission, or define ties your location. They can communicate your services if well articulated, or they can cause confusion if you steer too close to the edge of edginess. And, of course they can mean nothing at first, but become something once your company becomes something.
It is interesting to ask about established brands. What is their etymology? Behind the naming of every famous brand, there is an interesting history concealed that you might not know.
Have you ever used “backrub” to perform a web search? If you are not sure, then you might ask me to refer to it by it’s evolved name: Google. The company decided to evolve the name in 1998 to ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name was mistakenly spelt as “Google” resulting in the current condition of the brand.
Computers and fruit have little in common, yet Apple is the fruit that motivated Newton into discovering gravity and thus, provided the proper inspiration for continuous invention and progress of Apple Computers.
Adobe products get their namesake from the Adobe Creek River that ran behind the house of co-founder John Warnock, and the same can be said about our parent company Black Lantern Holdings, which chose the Black Lantern moniker partly due to the black street lanterns that were present outside the home where the first company meeting took place back in 2003.
Inspiration for Graphite Lab [chosen from over 100 potential candidates] comes from the notion that we are an art studio that strikes the right balance between simplicity and creativity [graphite] and technical competency and modern thinking [lab]. We’d considered variations of Graphite Interactive, Graphite Studios, and so on, but the “Lab” suffix communicated our passion to always been exploring new ideas – experimenting to get unique and wonderful results. It doesn’t hurt that the name is easy to say either. Having a short, yet memorable name is also important as we build our audience, and out of all the names we’d considered, it felt most like “us”.
You can see our online portfolio at www.graphitelab.com and can follow company updates via LinkedIn
Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.