going crazy

When only the exact .com will do

When your customers are four to ten years old, you want a brand name that’s not only going to be cool today, but cool tomorrow—when you’ll need to attract a fresh new crop of kids. And if your clothing is for both girls and boys, you’ll want to make sure that your product branding smacks of neither frills nor footballs. Appeals both to the little folks and the big people with the wallets. And is memorable enough to stand out in an overcrowded market.

These were some of the considerations shaping brand name development for Gymboree’s hip new value-driven clothing line and retail chain. But they were child’s play compared to coming up with an appropriate brand name that was available as a domain.

We took to the challenge like kids in a mud puddle. This brand name development exercise gave us license to play: with food names... color names... game names. And it didn’t hurt that many of us had kids of our own to draw upon for inspiration.

3,167 names and endless hours of screening and domain-name brokering later (including running the names by our own juvenile audience), we all fell in love with Crazy 8. Serious cross-gender appeal. Fun, but not babyish. Cool, in a grade school sort of way. Great on a label or pocket patch—not to mention a storefront or website. Crazy 8. Kinda crazy. Like a fox.

The first Crazy 8 opened in August 2007 and as of January 2008, there were 14 stores across the country.