I believe a name may be the most important thing a company owns. It is the first thing people meet and the last thing they remember.
This is the long story of ours.
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I was in high school when my Italian teacher introduced us to the Divine Comedy. One day she asked us to read an essay by Erich Auerbach, the great German scholar of Dante, and I discovered that the Comedy could be read on four levels. Dante explains them himself. The literal one tells you what happens. The allegorical one tells you what it stands for. The moral one tells you how to live. And the anagogical one points somewhere above all of that.
I remember thinking it was the most beautiful idea I had ever come across. You read a page, you believe you have understood everything, and underneath there is another layer waiting for you. And another one under that.
The idea stayed with me. Years later, a rabbi told me that, according to the Kabbalistic tradition, every verse of the Bible hides seventy-two layers. I have no idea if it is true. I liked it anyway.
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Some time later, I came across the story of Manfred Gotta, the German name-maker behind Twingo, Smart, Cayenne and Panamera. In the early nineties, Renault invited him to its design centre near Paris, showed him a little car that seemed to smile, and asked him for one thing only: a name. He stayed with that car, away from everyone, until a word came out. Twingo. He insists it means nothing at all. Millions of people have said it anyway, and almost none of them ever wondered where it came from.
I remember thinking: this is a job I would love. Ruminating on one thing for what feels like forever, turning it over like a stone in your pocket, until one morning you walk out and say: “that’s it!”.
This, by the way, explains why I have spent years ruminating on the name of my rock band and the name of my holding company. The fact that I have neither a rock band nor a holding company should not distract you. I will keep ruminating until the day I get to test one.
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Then, one day, the real test came.
I was meditating on my personal website, the one you are reading right now, and staring at a template full of placeholder text. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, and so on, the way every draft in the world begins. Something in me said: I don’t like this. It could be better.
It felt like a small eureka. Most of my ideas arrive that way, in the hypnagogic state, that strange border between waking and sleep where I compose a good part of what I write (I will tell you more about it in another post). That time, what arrived was eleven letters.
“Better Ipsum”.
A name has to survive you before it can represent you. So I put it under pressure.
It survived many meditations and several Montecristo White Labels, one of my favourite cigars, smoked during the Shultz hour, one of my favourite rituals. I have written about the Shultz hours before, but here it is in a few words: a cigar, your phone on airplane mode in another room, and a mind slowly learning to switch off. I ruminated, and ruminated, and ruminated, for weeks, trying to find something better than Better.
Honestly, it isn’t perfect. Nothing truly is. But it survived. Here is why.
Because Better Ipsum has eleven letters, and eleven is my favourite number.
Because what we do, every day, is show our clients and ourselves that everything can be done better.
Because you can put your own company next to it. As well as your firm, or your team: Better Rossi, Better Smith, Better You.
Because in our team we simply call it Better, without the Ipsum, and every time we say it, it nudges us a little further.
Because it speaks Latin, which is where I come from, and English, which gives it a voice that travels.
Because if you put two languages together in the same monicker, it reminds you that one plus one makes three.
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This should be a post about a name, but there is more. When you run a company, the name and the brand walk together.
If you look at ours, you have the golden section, also known as the Fibonacci spiral, which, together with the word, is already a registered trademark. Yes, really. So this post may be about Better Ipsum® as well.
The spiral is, in its own way, about performance. It is one of the places where nature shows how close to perfection it can get without any effort at all. A shell is also a small home, a place to sit and let the weather pass. And every time I look at ours, my mind goes to the Camino de Santiago, where every pilgrim carries a shell on the backpack (do you want to know more about the camino and the shell? Click here).
At some point I even thought about calling the company Shell. Unfortunately, a rather famous oil company had the same idea before me. In my defence, they had a head start of more than a century. It brought them some luck, I would say. I hope it brings a little to me too. (Their story may be tied to the Camino as well, but that is material for another post.)
That said, If you ask me which part matters most, the name or the image, I will give you a third answer. The R.
The R stands for revolution. It tells you that things can be done differently, sometimes in a revolutionary way. It reminds me that rebellion, the gentle and stubborn kind, is one of the ways we make wonderful things. That is why, in our payoff, the R looks in the opposite direction from everyone else: (Я)evolution.
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Dante had a poem to work with. I had a company, and in my case the layers go well beyond the words. There is the text, of course. Then the brand, the shell, the identity, the colours.. The marketing, which decides how the name walks into a room. And the message, which is what people carry home once it has left. Each one is a different way of reading the same eleven letters.
So let me give it back to you the way my teacher gave Dante to me, many years ago.
Literally, Better Ipsum is a placeholder that got tired of being a placeholder.
Allegorically, it is a shell. Something that grows by spiraling outward, one turn at a time, and keeps its shape as it grows.
Morally, it asks one small thing of everyone who carries it: be a little better than yesterday. Clients, partners, interns and, first of all, me.
Anagogically, well. That one we are still walking towards. Ask us again in a few years.
And underneath those four there are others. A few I have shared only with the people who work with me. A few I keep for myself. And a few, I suspect, I have not found yet.
Behind every company there is a name. Behind every name, there is a brand. Behind every brand, if you look long enough, there is a choice. Three years ago, mine was to make up a name for something that could one day stand in a room without me. It turns out names do that too. Once they are out in the world, they start meaning things on their own.
At the end of the day, every page starts with a placeholder.
Ours just refused to stay one.
