When we first decided to start our student business, it was mainly just for the fun of it all. We thought it would be interesting to take what we learned in class and apply to situations in the real world. As we dove deeper into that idea, it became more and more obvious to us that our community was in need of the services that we provide. There are so many interesting, thriving businesses in our town that have very little, if any, marketing strategies. We spent months learning about programs like Photoshop and WordPress, not fully realizing the immediate demand for those skills in today’s market.
It sounds funny, but the idea of naming our business didn’t actually come in till later on in the process. We felt it was most important to flesh out our product and how we were going to deliver it before we actually put a tag on it. Originally, there were 25 students in our class when we started up this idea. We came together and started brainstorming ideas. The ideas that we came up with were mostly trendy ideas, popular at the that moment but wouldn’t stand the test of time. We came up with things like “Cats Design” and “WildWeb”to try and match with our mascot, but they all seemed so cheesy.
When we came up with the idea of “design”, it just seem to fit that we put the number 25 in there to pay homage to the original 25 members of the founding class. When we talked to people out in the community about this business name, the response was overwhelmingly positive. The only conflict that we had was that lots of people tended to call it “25 Designs” instead of “25 Design”. This was actually kind of a good thing, because there are confusion over the name made them curious and sparked a discussion. We didn’t actually run into anybody that recommended that we revise the name.
After several years of using the name on our shirts, cards, social media, and all of our documentation, we have decided to stick with it. We feel like it pays respect to the people that originally started this class, is interesting, is unique, and serves to spark discussion with whomever we are speaking with. Why fix something that isn’t broken, right?
