Part 3 - What’s in a name?

The process of experimenting took years. We did this in our spare time alongside two full time jobs and of course a worldwide pandemic. Far from being furloughed and having heaps of time to crack on with things, Covid 19 meant a busier schedule than ever for Tina who (having just retired weeks before) volunteered to go back in and work at a local hospital on a Covid ward and Lizzy who as a teacher was thrown headfirst into the stresses of working out how to effectively teach four year olds online (not easily is the answer) alongside going in to school to support children of Key Workers. This is not to complain, given everything, I think that our experience of Covid was fairly positive, but it certainly wasn’t the vast expanse of uninterrupted time at home that perhaps we were expecting when lockdown was announced.

Despite this, we muddled our way through and came closer and ever closer to perfecting our bars. In retrospect the inordinate amount of time we spent on research and development was to our detriment. In the  commercial world, we hit the market farrr too late. Rather than being pioneers, by the time we came to sell our first bar, shampoo bars were mostly common knowledge (at least to our eco-minded target audience) and there were already some other major liquid shampoo brands developing their own solid equivalent. In fact, the brand that had initially sparked the idea was from New Zealand and originally unavailable in the UK, but by  the time we were ready to sell it had made its way overseas and could now be found in a few small health/ wellbeing stores. In this sense, we were kicking ourselves. We questioned if our standards had been too rigorous so delaying our bar coming to market. We questioned if we even wanted to sell it now that there were other great bars on the market already. We questioned a lot.

Biosurfactants

On the other hand, being so slow in the development process had its advantages. The most obvious one being that we did things properly. We assessed each ingredient on numerous ethical and environmental factors. We were thorough in all our experimenting ensuring ultimately that we ended up with a product that we perceived was better than anything else currently on sale. One of the brilliant things that we couldn’t have predicted, was the development of other technology during our refinement process. Somewhere along our journey we came across these phenomenal surfactants (cleansers) that instead of being manufactured through the traditional chemical processes, were produced instead via fermentation! These special surfactants (known as biosurfactants) where in the process of being developed in a few places across the world. We found one place in America developing them and one in our very own Manchester University, England. On enquiring about purchasing some from Manchester University we were informed that they were very much in the development stage and not ready for commercial sale. Disappointed, we looked at the America route, even asking a friend who was living in New York to take delivery of a sample for us and hold onto it until I went out to visit her later that year. We experimented with the sample and loved it but ultimately decided that shipping ingredients over from America didn’t fit our ethos - or budget!

Persevering, researching, making more samples, testing on more friends, going back to the drawing board continued for at least another year.

The following year however, we found a small company in Liverpool called Holiferm who had come up with a novel way of scaling up the production of biosurfactants enabling them to be sold commercially. We were utterly thrilled. Not only did these biosurfactants have a much greener profile than traditional surfactants, they also had amazing implications for scalp microbiome health. Anyone who knows anything about gut health is aware that eating fermented foods is admirable. Well the same is true for other microbiomes around the body i.e. the skin microbiome needs to be supported also. Microbes cover your body and thus all sorts of different microbiomes exist – including on your scalp. These bacteria, microbes and yeast live in equilibrium with each other. It is when things get out of balance that problems can arise. The awesome thing about our biosurfactants is that they are classed as ‘post-biotics’ which are great for any microbiome (along with the more well known pre- and pro-biotics). Anyway, long story short, had we launched sooner than we did we would have missed out on these amazing ingredients which we truly believe are the reason so many of our customers obtain such brilliant results with our bars!

We did it...?

Eventually we found ourselves happy with our creation. Suddenly we realised that if we really did want to sell this thing we were going to need to package it.

Oh wait.

And we were going to need a name.

And to form a company.

And what were the regulations around selling cosmetics?

Did we have to pass health and safety tests?

And a website would probably be helpful.

What about finances?

Out of what seemed like nowhere we were faced with some big tasks that hadn’t really crossed our minds before as we’d be so focused on making our product perfect.

Side note – this is apparently quite common with entrepreneurs: they focus on the product too much and forget about everything else. This is supposedly often why a lot of start-ups aren’t successful.

Naming our company

Before we did anything else we figured we should name our company. If we were  going to give this a go, then a name was pretty essential. The next part of this story is nothing short of embarrassing, but as I’ve said before and will say again, this whole company has been built on failure and my goodness, we failed a lot on this one.

Initially we bounced a few ideas around and I suggested Tiaki to mum. It’s a Māori word which means ‘to care for’ or ‘to protect’. My dad is a New Zealander (although a Pākehā New Zealander and not a Māori) so I felt a strong connection with the country and its culture. The meaning of the word was perfect aligning with our ethos. We settled on it and registered Tiaki with Companies House. Sorted. Far from it.

I don’t know if someone said something or the realisation came to me another way, but after some time there was a gentle dawning that Tiaki wasn’t such a good idea. Although dad is a Kiwi he has no Māori heritage so neither do I. I began to feel that  using a word whose language I had no claim to was not appropriate. The words ‘cultural misappropriation’ sprang to mind. I proceeded to email the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office, the Ministry of Māori development and the Māori language commission. I was advised that although the only way of knowing if we would cause offence by using this word was to register it and go through an official process, the use of any Māori language as a Business name was unadvisable.

We had our answer. It was disconcerting that the potential for offence had not dawned on us earlier. One never purposefully sets out to cause offence. But, as always, lesson learned. Brainstorming session 2 generated the name Soul and Sea. We couldn’t go wrong with this one could we? Plain old English, not as pretty as Tiaki perhaps, but still within our kind of vibe. So off we went, back to Companies House for an official name change. In our rush to change the name however we completely neglected to do any research into our new name.We did check that there was not a similar name registered with companies house but we should also have Googled the name.  Had we taken the time to even type ‘Soul and Sea shampoo bar’ into Google we would have been faced with a “sea” of search results that showed another company, Soul and Soap, who also sell shampoo bars. We couldn’t believe it. Given that we were selling the same thing our name was far too similar and even if Soul and Soap weren’t too bothered/ didn’t see us as a threat, we didn’t want to be competing against that every time someone Googled us!

Kicking ourselves (again) we went back to the drawing board. We were in less of a rush this time and promised ourselves to undertake our due diligence on any new name. The problem was however, that no new names seemed to pop into our heads! We were drawing blanks for quite a while. At the time, I was reading a book by Robert MacFarlane called Landmarks which is an in depth exploration into language and it's links to our environment around the British Isles. It was in this book that I first came across the word An’du, meaning 'to keep a boat in once place by rowing gently against the tide or current' in Old Shetlandic. I immediately fell in love with the word and suggested it to mum. She loved it also, we both liked the slightly abstract way that its meaning described our mission. Undertaking our  due diligence researching both the language and culture along with any competing business names thoroughly. And - until anyone points out the serious something that we’ve overlooked – this is the name we’re sticking with! So, another costly session on the Companies House website later, An’du Care Limited was officially born.

Moral of the story – choosing a name for your company is 100% more complicated than choosing a name for your children…