Week 3: At Last, A Name

After weeks and weeks of agonizing over a name to name our little store, Mimi and I decided on one: Nouvelle Boutique.

The name was originally going to be Nouveau Boutique, but our friend Justin, who is in French and had to check whether the words were masculine or feminine, said Nouvelle was the right way to go.

Initially, we had tried Chrimi (which is pronounced like "creamy"), but we decided that would have been better if we had opened up a pastry shop or something like that. After scouring dictionary.com to no end, we finally turned to Google Translate and looked up things that we felt related to our store in French. We decided on French because it's such a beautiful language and that so many people know. In addition, so many English words are similar to French words, so even those who don't take French might have an idea of what the word means.

I'm relieved we got the name out of the way. It makes our shop seem more real and concrete, rather than some idealized thought process we had going on in our minds.

Once we figured out the name, I started playing around with Paint (sadly, I lack Photoshop, but even if I did have it, I wouldn't know how to use it) and came up with a few designs. The black one on the left is the very first logo I came up with. I imagined a logo being sleek and really professional, so I went with black and white and typical Times New Roman. I then continued to play with more colors to see what
would make make out design pop a little bit more. I tried this pretty sea foam green that I kind of liked, but I realized it didn't make the letters as clear as the black one did. At last, I attempted to make our logo more colorful by using a gradient of my and Mimi's favorite colors. To keep it simple, I used the initials and rather than a large explanation, a small caption-like explanation under the main logo.

Upon deciding, Mimi and I decided to go with my initial logo, which was the black one. We still haven't decided whether or not we're going to screen print them to sell yet, because we have to see whether people would be interested in buying them or not, but it's definitely an option for us!

On a final note, we also decided that we are going to donate half of our profits to either a non-profit organization or potentially an orphanage. We want to really make what we're doing count and be able to make a different in the lives of others.

Wish us luck on our journey of re-acquiring, re-designing, and re-selling! (: