bluehouse Weblog

The most frequent question we’ve been asked since we opened six weeks ago is: “Why the name bluehouse?” The answer is probably a lot less concise and snappy than would be recommended in a marketing book, most of which are called [Insert Exclamation in Eye-Popping Typeface Here!]: How to Market Your Business so You Can [Insert Outrageous Claim of Riches Here]. But if you have a few minutes, I’ll tell you.

bluehouse was two years in the making, and before we burst onto the scene last month as your friendly neighborhood eco-friendly home store and café, we went through a few different incarnations. The first was a short-lived concept called “Qi: Harmonious Living,” in which, on top of having all of our merchandise be environmentally friendly, it would also conform to the principles of feng shui. Qi, pronounced chi, is the Chinese word for the life-giving energy that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the universe together; the concept is central in feng shui, which is the art of arranging your possessions for the best flow of energy to attract health, happiness, and prosperity. Qi suffered an early death when nobody but me thought it was an appealing name . . . and when we discovered just how difficult it was to get attractive and affordable eco-friendly merchandise at all, much less stuff that conforms with an extra layer of conceptual purity.

(The remnants of Qi remain to this day, however, in the name of our holding company, IQ, LLC. Get it? QI? IQ? I guess you had to be there.)

So nameless, our concept in flux, we bounced around for a while. We gave some serious thought to being a quietly responsible company, not emphasizing our innovative attributes in case we eventually found we couldn’t live up to our idealistic standards. But, again and again, we found that the idea of an “environmentally friendly furniture store” was what immediately captured the interest of the people we surveyed, and it served as both a way to distinguish ourselves in the marketplace and as a necessary education for today’s consumers.

A number of name ideas came down the pike, some bad, some good, but none with a workable spark. At one point, we had tentatively settled upon “greenhouse,” only to reject it in short order as not only a bit too precious but also too intertwined with existing associations our customers might have with the word.

In August of 2004, my partner and I were driving in the Catskill mountains, near Woodstock in upstate New York, when we were struck by how brilliantly blue the sky was, a perfect dome silhouetting mountains and trees, encapsulating everything both familiar and wild, uniting us all. “Did you ever think of ‘bluehouse’ instead of ‘greenhouse’?” asked Rob. I actually had. At the time, it was just grasping at straws, trying to come up with something clever and new, and I rejected it as possibly too bizarre. But when I heard the word in that context, under that sky, it made perfect sense. Later, when I ran it by a friend who is a notable Chicago-based branding consultant, she was incredibly enthusiastic, as were others on whom we tested it. And so . . . there we were.

Our name doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that we are in a “blue state” (the guess I hear most often); we are not affiliated with the Korean Blue House (the name of their Presidential residence) or the Australian rock band Bluehouse. We are not affiliated with anyone, really.

But in a sense, taking our name from the earth and the sky that connects us all, we are affiliated with everyone.