What's in a name? Choosing a name for your business

CreativeJigsaw didn't have a blog . . . until now! That means there's months...nay...years of a blogging back-log to catch up on! It must be the same for any company's first forays into giving visitors a regular blog - where to start? Well surely there's nowhere better than a look back into the mists of time of where the name CreativeJigsaw came from...

Every name has a story...

CreativeJigsaw came into existence as the name of a video production company in around 2007. I had been asked to do a professional wedding film (which ironically is not something that CreativeJigsaw generally gets involved with these days) alongside my day job. Film production wasn't about to become a full time occupation just then, but nonetheless I thought I should come up with a name that I could operate under.

Some people just use their own name and add "limited" (probably illegal unless the company actually is a limited company!) or something to give a clue as to what the business is about, like "John Smith Productions", "Alison Williams Photography", "Philip Jones Gardening" (if any of these are real name that's completely accidental by the way!) This seemed boring to me, although try telling that to Eddie Stobart - I mean, did he even put "Haulage" or whatever after his name? I'm not sure - Eddie's sadly no longer with us but the company appears to just be "Eddie Stobart" now, and you can bet that no one associated with the company is about to change the name any time soon, it's just so recognisable! I mean, people even "lorry spot" the names of the Eddie Stobart vehicles! But I digress...

To my mind using my own name didn't feel like the way I wanted to go. But what name to use? The thing is, it could be absolutely anything! Now you could be reading this blog as someone who's in exactly this position now. You can decide on whatever name you want - with a few exceptions, the obvious one being that you can't use a name that someone else is already using!

Is my name choice safe?

Now I wondered about this - how to be sure that I wasn't breaching someone else's claim to a name, and also how, having decided upon a name, to make sure no one else could steal it? If you're a limited company your company name is registered at Companies House. If you're not a limited company, from what I was able to gather, you're free to use a name that's not already in use and, once you've used it and established it, you would have a right to prevent someone else from using that name themselves, certainly in the same field of work anyway (there's a company, for example, called "M & S Car Sales Oldham", and as far as I know Marks & Spencer, who are also, and very commonly, known as M&S, aren't suing them for misuse of the "M&S" name).

At least with the internet's powerful search engines it's possible to check for the use of your possible name choices, a quick search should find any companies who've beaten you to it. Even then I believe it's possible to avoid problems (and you could do this yourself anyway to be on the safe side) by regionalising your name, like adding your town or area after the name.

Why CreativeJigsaw?

So, why CreativeJigsaw? Well, I was asked this recently when interviewed by Chester-based magazine Amble.to (here's a link to the article: https://amble.to/spotlight/a-little-droning-on-is-totally-guaranteed/). I'm quoted as saying "It’s about bringing things together in a creative way – any kind of filming project is a bit like that" and I think that's a fair representation.

Film production is certainly creative, and without doubt it's something of a jigsaw to put together - client negotiation, scheduling, scripts, shot lists, risk assessments (especially for aerial filming), weather considerations (ditto), kit preparation, getting those interesting shots without missing the moment, getting all the footage into the editor, sifting through all the footage, labelling the footage, choosing suitable background music, editing the shots together, adding titles, adding transitions, rendering the production...I haven't even mentioned getting it to the client but I'll stop there as I'm feeling tired just thinking about it! I don't think I've tried to write all the steps down before! Anyway, it all comes together a bit like a creative jigsaw...so CreativeJigsaw isn't a bad name, is it?

You may have noticed that a decision was taken to write the name as "CreativeJigsaw", that is, as a joined-up single word, a bit like "YouTube". This just seemed like a nice modern way to have a single-word name, although it regularly causes problems with other people not writing it this way! There was a chance to correct it for the Amble article, but the press release went straight out from Techniquest and so we're "Creative Jigsaw" in the article on Wrexham.com (see http://www.wrexham.com/news/local-video-company-shoots-promo-video-for-wrexhams-science-and-discovery-centre-146608.html). And until recently, using Google to search for "Creative Jigsaw" without adding anything else such as "films" returned the page for "Creative Jigsaws, high quality wooden name jigsaws" and "Jigsaw Creative Solutions Limited" but we didn't even make the first page of results!

Don't forget your web address...

One final note about your business's name...you need a suitable website domain name to go with it. We were really pleased to get "www.creativejigsaw.com", but I've since read that it's better for your domain name to say something about what the business does. So maybe we should've gone for something like "www.creativejigsawfilms.com". It's too late for us now though, and in any case www.tesco.com has got away with it well enough! But something else for new businesses to consider (and something we'd advise on for the occasions when we build websites for other businesses).