Our name

Where’d it come from?

Short answer is this tune was on in Emmet’s (founder guy) house one day when he was dreaming up what to call what is now Curious Orange. And his kids just kept on repeating the words. Kurious Oranj. Kurious Oranj. Over and over. It was catchy.

But could this be our name? Could we build a brand with a strong visual language and identity from it? The name percolated for a while and just wouldn't go away. It was fun, memorable and sticky. Especially when juxtaposed against the usual “Blah, Blah, Blah and Partners”, or the clunky portmanteaus cobbled together from something vaguely marketing related and a random verb/noun/adjective. 

But guyzzz…usually “the why” is done before the idea is baked

Yeah, it’s true. For the most part in this industry the thinking and rationale come before the idea. You know the drill – take a brief, then look at the data, and see what the proverbial Jones are doing before meandering via a series of false starts to the winner. 

Usually that's what we do. But sometimes we also post-rationalize when we get immediately attached to something our gut says could be a winner. Don’t we? ‘Course we do.

So now we have this name that we love. Next step is to stress test it and see if we can give it meaning. Preferably something that resonates with our values.

How we brought meaning to the idea

First we asked what is curiosity? How does it fit in our industry and why is it important to us? We kept coming back to how curiosity is the antithesis of arrogance. There’s inherent humility (a core value at CO HQ) in being Curious. And when you're humble you don’t have the burden of arrogance – which lets you ask the questions you need to get things right. 

Pretty simple. But once we hit on this we realised it was enough to hang our hats on. It also served as a reminder that it’s actually ok to start in the middle, or in our case at the end. Because it’s where ideas end up that’s important – not how you get there.

Hang on…what about the Orange bit?

Curious describes our character but Orange defines our aesthetic. And that’s a whole part 2 which we’ll get into in the next post.