Learn about the origins of our name and our respect-first, community-centered approach to branding.
The naming process is harrowing, even for someone who does it for a living.
The name of your brand is the doorway to your story; who you are, what you stand for, the experience your community will have with you.
As I poured over lists of potential names that lived on napkins, iPhone notes, and scraps of paper from bedside table epiphanies, the name R&Co. kept rising to the top. Despite its use as a popular hair care brand, the container those three parts formed to hold the story of this business felt vast and right.
Let’s start with R.
Respect is a concept that holds a lot of importance for me. From the way I want to live my life and my business, to the ways I hope to treat others and be treated by others, respect is a two way road that I walk with intention. If respect is missing from an encounter, a relationship, a conversation, it’s a no for me. So having respect as a core founding principle of this business felt important.
Relationships are what I believe are the secret to success; whether that’s marketing success, sales success, business success, personal success, you name it and relationships are at the center. I prioritize building relationships instead of “converting leads” (ick) for both my own business and for my clients, and the relationships I create with the teammates who make up the R&Co. community are just as important to me as the ones I cultivate with clients.
Resilience is what I believe a strong brand can create for a company or person. Research proved that strong brands recovered 9x faster following the 2008 financial crash, and when you ask how companies seamlessly integrate into new markets or launch new products that have nothing to do with their original product or service, I would answer because they are led by their brand. Knowing who you are, what you stand for, and how that is expressed can be a powerful tool for all facets of a business. Understanding and letting your brand lead your business decisions, marketing decisions, and hiring decisions is how you can confidently navigate uncertainty, adversity, and the ebbs and flows of business and life.
Rigor, Real, Resonate, Revel, Refreshing, Revolution… the R words that have meaning to my brand are endless.
An ampersand is not only a fun graphic to leverage in a brand identity, it represents a coming together of separate forces. I believe community is a verb, it requires active participation of all parties. So, for R&Co. the ampersand represents the importance of collaboration and the relationships forged through a partnership of mutual respect, active listening, and applied empathy.
Co. stands for company in most abbreviated uses such as this. The company we keep, or in my interpretation, the community we’re building is, at the end of day, why I started this to begin with. Many other co- words are infused with that same sense of commitment to community: collaboration, connection, collective, coalition, communication.
It stands for a collective centered around respect. It stands for the ways we build resilience for your brand by focusing on building community. It stands for hard work and good company. It stands for doing things differently, with intention, and with authenticity in an industry, culture, and society that wants you to conform.
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