Blog II - What’s in a name

When we made the decision to turn our passion for watches into a business, the first thing we put our creative effort into was coming up with a name. It made sense to us to begin with what we thought would be a straightforward task and one upon which the business would be founded. We wanted the name in place because we knew it would play a seminal role in the rest of the branding. 

So how hard could it be. We have two sons each, so between us we have come up with four names before. Where to start? When picking a name for a baby you have a whole wealth of books and websites to trawl through and whittle down the lists. You have historic family names, names from film and TV, names of your favourite childhood book characters. A business name conception, however, is such a different experience because you are specifically trying to create something unique and not familiar. 

Being that there are two of us, we liked the idea of the business mimicking this by taking the format of 'Name' & 'Name'. We went back and forth with any number of variations on this, but none of them sounded quite right or unique enough. By this point we had done little else towards developing the business other than spending a lot of time on the name, so in order to progress in other areas, we parked it... As X & X Watches, the X's to be decided at a later date. Speaking on a daily basis about the business, we referred to it by this name, until one day one of us said 'you know what... X & X Watches is starting to sound really good' and it stuck. From that point, we began discussions with a graphic designer and the rest of the branding was built around the name. 

Although X & X initially represented our indecision, it then became a symbol of taking something that serves a purpose and assigning your own meaning to it... Just like the watches that inspired the decision to start the business.