”Reading 4 ”minutes”.
We love our name Hrayo. We hope you do as well. It took us some time and a few headaches to come up with it.
As we found out, finding a cool company name is not easy. There were zillions of companies before us. There are many cool people, with many original ideas on how to name their businesses. So it is not that you just think of something and that’s it.
I am not sure that we had all the name requirements at the beginning written down but we can formalize them with the advantage of hindsight:
- One word. We wanted it to be one word that is not common but still easy to remember and spell. So NOT something like “Sesquipedalian”.
- One short word (5 – 7 characters) that can be easily pronounced. So NOT something like “smrk” which is an actual Czech word although it looks like a chunk of random consonants.
- Gives us freedom. We wanted a name that is NOT bound to something really specific like a genre or target audience. So NOT ScaryGamesForCrazyKids.
- Free domain. We wanted to have a domain that is .com free and does not require us to use additional words. So NOT “thecoolname-boardgames.com”.
I believe these are widespread requirements for many people starting a company.
The process: name and logo
The very first idea
Vašek had a very nice idea at the very beginning: “Playshire”, and I just thought “That’s it.” It was cool and sounded nice, and even the Czech translation “Hrajokraj” sounded nice. However, very soon we found out, that a company with such a name already exists. They produce toys and games (how unexpected :D). And for us, a long search for a brand name started.
Brainstorming, all the time
It took us about a month of brainstorming to come up with “Hrayo”. We brainstormed during the evenings, long walks while driving a car, and even while waiting in a queue for a concert. We wrote down every single idea that crossed our minds. No matter how good or bad it was. In the image below you can see some of our ideas (a few ones are censored because we hope to use them in the future for some of our board games :)).
One of the most useful tools we had was our whiteboard. You can use your smartphone, tablet, or whatever device you have to jot down your ideas, but the whiteboard worked the best for us.
We had a wide range of ideas and we tried left and right to find something we found acceptable. Our favorite option was still “Playshire”. However, as I mentioned already, it was already taken.
The logo with a fennec fox
Believe it or not “Fellow Fennec” was one of the options we had in mind as there was a phase when we were trying to incorporate some interesting animal into the brand name. At that point, we gave up on the ideal one-word name and decided to go with the “Fellow Fennec”. We even drafted a logo for that business name and we liked it. So, we kept it!
As you can see, it was not a totally useless detour. The logo is a little less boring and more playful than simple lettering like “SONY”, “Google”, etc. Also, you can easily remember and recognize the big orange ears, at least I hope so :).
The turning point
The turning point was when I said “I still like Playshire much more though.” So we got back to our whiteboard and stared at the words “playshire” and “hrajokraj” (the same word in Czech). We thought that even the Czech word sounded good. So we started to play with it, trying to make it shorter and easier to read for English audiences and that was it. From “hrajokraj” we went to “hrajo”, and changed it to “hrayo” to approximate the Czech pronunciation.
Eureka! The domain hrayo.com was available. We could not believe our eyes. There was the bit of luck we needed.
Does Hrayo mean anything?
In Czech “hrajou” means “they play”. However, it is pronounced like “hrayo” as ChatGPT can explain to you in detail.
The legal side
In the Czech Republic similarly to many other countries, you cannot register a company if the name is close to another business name even if they work in different industries. That applies even if the difference is just one letter and the pronunciation is different. We have found a couple of names that were too close in the Czech business registry.
Therefore, our official business name is hrayo.games s.r.o. The name hrayo.games is a bit of wordplay as it essentially means when translated to English “they play games”. The first Czech part represents our origins and the second English part hopefully represents our future international gamers.
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