Читать книгу The Freelance Mum: A flexible career guide for better work-life balance - Annie Ridout - Страница 12

Now that you’ve come up with your freelance career focus, you need to turn yourself into a brand. Will your freelance work be under your name, or will you create a more general name? For instance, my copywriting and consultancy work is under Annie Ridout (annieridout.com) while my digital magazine is called The Early Hour. Down the line, you might want to expand your services and have other people work for you, so this is worth bearing in mind. That said, Arianna Huffington had no issue turning The Huffington Post, clearly named after her, into a multi-million-dollar enterprise, so if the brand’s really strong, and the work is respected, that will be what matters most.

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, said in his autobiography that the idea for his business name stemmed from him being on one of his ‘fruitarian diets’. He’d just come back from an apple farm and thought the name ‘Apple’ sounded ‘fun, spirited and not intimidating’. The name for the BlackBerry phone – the first device that could send and receive emails wirelessly, initially via a pager and later a mobile phone – came about following a brainstorming session with Lexicon consultancy, who are devoted to naming products. Having the word ‘email’ in the title sounded boring so they looked outside of the box, at unrelated things that make people feel good. Someone suggested ‘strawberry’ but it was rejected for sounding too ‘slow’.¹ ‘Blackberry’ was suggested, as the device was black and this sounded snappy. The name stuck and the company rocketed.

So it’s worth having a good think about names and not choosing anything that will make people pigeon-hole you in the wrong way. I wanted The Early Hour to be for both mums and dads, which is why I didn’t use the word ‘mum’ in the title. I decided on the concept of publishing articles early in the morning, at 5 a.m., for parents who were up with their young babies or kids, and the name followed after a brainstorming session with my sister. We listed everything we could think of associated with mornings, early, parenting, babies – and this one stuck. Well, initially we thought of ‘early hours’ but there were too many existing brands with this name. And in the end, we liked that it was more rhythmic-sounding and that it was as if ‘the early hour’ was our hour; we owned it. It also felt this name would still work if the brand expanded to include consultancy, which it has, or other branches of work.