I am often asked what Easter Hay means and how I came up with the name for my company.
When I decided to start my own business, one of the first tasks was to find a name. That is not particularly easy – especially when you also need to find a domain name that matches.
After spending quite some time coming up with various – more or less qualified – ideas, only to discover that someone else had already had the same thought and taken the domain, I came across a video by Danish entrepreneur Martin Thorborg.
His point was that you can spend a great deal of time thinking about company names, symbols and everything surrounding them, but in the end, the name itself matters less than you might think. What really matters is what you build around it and the business you create.
Suitably inspired by Martin Thorborg, I spent a Friday evening with a bottle of red wine and some music from my younger days playing in the background.
At some point, Frank Zappa came through the speakers – and I immediately thought there might be some inspiration to find there.
Frank Zappa was, and still is, one of my great musical heroes. First and foremost, he certainly knew his way around a guitar, but he also had a very distinctive way with words and song titles – often at the more obscure end of the spectrum.
I started going through some of his albums and tracks until I came across Watermelon in Easter Hay.
And I thought:
What is Easter Hay?
I searched online to see if I could find an answer, but very little came up apart from references to the Frank Zappa track.
On the other hand, I discovered that the relevant domain names were available and that a search for Easter Hay produced very few results.
So I thought:
Why not?
There is no deeper meaning behind the name. It is simply a small and slightly unusual story about how Easter Hay came to be.
If you would like to hear Watermelon in Easter Hay, you can listen to it on Spotify.
Link to "Watermelon in Easter Hay" on Spotify
You need to get about a minute into the track before it really gets going. The song appears on the album Joe’s Garage, which tells a continuous story, and The Central Scrutinizer speaks over the beginning of the track.
So yes – Easter Hay may sound a little unusual, but over time the name has become both meaningful and fun to me.
And that is exactly how I want my company to be.
Thanks to Martin Thorborg for the inspiration. You can watch the video that helped get the naming process moving here.
