How Do You Name a Photography Business?
If you’re just starting out in business as a photographer, or you’re expanding on your current business into a new genre and think you need a new brand to go along with it, you’re going to need a brand name. Naming your photography business is one of the most crucial steps of developing your brand, but it’s not the most important. Build an amazing business and people will speak your name. That being said, it certainly doesn’t hurt, and it absolutely helps, to make it easier for people to remember the name of your business.
Defining your name is one of the most important steps you can take in defining your brand. Your name is your primary brand identifier. In commercial photography, 99% of brands are simply the photographer’s name. That’s because art producers are hiring that specific person for their specific vision. You are your brand.
While it’s not unheard of for advertising or editorial photographers to operate under a brand name or studio name, it is highly uncommon, so for the rest of this episode, I’m going to focus on consumer-service photographers, businesses, and brands.
When I started my wedding photography business, I needed it to be a separate brand from my advertising and editorial work. Art producers and photo editors want to hire and work with experts in their genres (advertising, portraits, beauty, interiors, food, product, etc.).
If you’re a commercial photographer like I am but also shoot weddings and families, then your weddings really need to be on a separate website if you want to be taken seriously as an advertising photographer. In smaller towns, you can get away with being more of a generalist, but in larger cities, you really do need to either specialize or at least show the appearance of specialization.
Should You Name Your Photography Business After Yourself?
With weddings, portraits, and other direct-to-consumer photography genres, simply using your name can be a disadvantage to standing out from the crowd. There has been a lot of education out there that emphasizes that you are the brand, that people hire you, and I agree with that to an extent, especially as I just mentioned in commercial photography, where you are being hired over and over by the same clients.
Before you name your photography business after yourself, ask yourself if, at some point in the future, you want to be able to expand your brand to include other photographers. If you do, you might want to consider a name other than your own. My friend Eva changed the name of her wedding photography business a few years ago because she was adding associate photographers and didn’t want to confuse her clients, so she changed the name of her company to Philosophy Studios.
Another thing to consider is how many other photographers in your market have similar names. Will your name stand out? Or will you simply be another Annabelle Mae, Laura-Jean, Chris Dimarco? (Names I just invented to emphasize my point.) Or does your name stand out? And even if your name does stand out, will people be able to know how to spell it, what to type into their search engine to find you, or even remember which Kelly you are when Google suggests five portrait photographers in your area named Kelly. And was that Kelly with a Y or Kelli with an I?
If you already use your own name, or are committed to using your own name, then you’re all set. You’re good to go. But if you are starting a new business or brand, or even thinking about a new brand, then I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive into the techniques I used to come up with the name for my wedding photography studio, Blackwood Studios.
How to Select a Name
In the last episode, I briefly touched on identifying your core values. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, you can go back and do that now, or do right after this episode finishes.
I had a few key criteria my new brand name needed to follow:
It had to be true to who I was as a person. It needed to resonate with me. I needed to care about it.
It needed to be a name that wasn’t soft sounding.
It needed to sound like a luxury name.
Has to Be True to Me
In the last episode, I talked about how one of the things important to me, personally, is having natural materials in my life. I am a bamboo fanatic — I love bamboo everything! — and the first thought I had when naming my wedding studio was to call it Bamboo Studios. But in Toronto, there is a wedding photography studio called Mango Studios and I felt they sounded too similar. So, I did a braindump. I grabbed a piece of paper and just filled it words that I felt resonated with me that were specifically related to natural materials and the outdoors. Sequoia. Oak & Acorn. Black Bamboo. Redwood. Spruce. Hickory. Elm. There were a lot of tree names.
Not Soft Sounding
The next factor for me was that it had to be a name that wasn’t soft. Since my shop is just me, I wanted a name that didn’t sound soft or cute. And while I may be soft and cute on the outside, it doesn’t exactly describe my personality. So names like Sequoia and Elm were quickly removed from the list. I also knew I wanted dark a simple, black-and-white colour palette. Black and white design is typically clean and simple, but also tends to be considered a masculine colour scheme, especially in design. Black-and-white is also a common palette among luxury brands like Chanel, Mercedes-Benz, and Gulfstream. And I want my business to be elevated to luxury status within the next five years.
Sounds Luxury
So that’s the final criteria. I wanted the name to sound like it was a luxury brand. Distinguished. This is the part I had the most trouble with, but I finally came up with a litmus test for the names, and that was that it had to sound like something a wealthy person would name their estate in the Hamptons or their manor house in the countryside. So, hipster sounding names like Oak & Acorn were eliminated.
What I ended up doing was I actually started Googling “names of estates,” “names of manor houses,” and “names of old English homes.” Somewhere in those searches I came across a webpage titled Old English Origin Surnames. Those names were perfect. They were exactly what I was looking for: Bentley, Hunter, Huxley, Blackwood. BLACKWOOD!
That was it! I actually couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it. It was perfect. It is perfect. It’s me. It feels like me. It’s strong and masculine. It even sounds choppy: Blackwood. And it sounds like something a wealthy person would name their country home: Blackwood Manor.
Define Your Own Criteria
Keep in mind this was true for me alone. These were my criteria. It won’t ring true for you to use my criteria. It may seem like a ridiculous notion that my brand had to sound like the name of a wealthy manor house, but that’s exactly the message I want to convey in that one word. And I think it succeeds. So, in order to define your brand name, you’re going to have to define your own criteria and stick with them. It has to resonate with you. What’s important to you? How do you want your name to sound when people speak it? What is your market position? What image do you want to convey when people hear your name?
Other Issues to Consider
As you go through this process, you’re also going to need to check and see if there are other businesses with the same or similar names as yours. For me, there is another business named Blackwood Studios, but it’s a recording studio in Los Angeles, so I don’t think people will confuse us. If a business exists with a similar name, you’ll need to scrap yours and go back to the drawing board. Go through the process as many times as you need to.
If you find a good name, you’ll then need to secure a web domain. Try to get a .COM. If that’s available, try a regional TLD such as .CO.UK, .IE, .CA, etc. You can also try other TLDs. I went with a .CO because those are pretty well known. I recommend avoiding fancy or fun TLDs like .PHOTOS or .PHOTOGRAPHY because:
they are not widely enough known that everyone understands them
For social sharing, when you or your clients type them into Facebook or Twitter, they won’t get auto-converted to hyperlinks
Finally, secure the social media accounts for your brand. Try to get all the handles to match. Start with Instagram because that will likely be a main social sharing site for you. If you can’t get your studio name:
you can add other bits such as “itsblackwoodstudios,”
remove all the vowels if your name is still legible
Make it your website: ex. @blackwoodstudios.co
Whatever you decide to do, just make sure your brand name is simple, different from your competition, and easy to remember.
