Episode 3 | Andrew Le Roy

No, I didn’t invent the steam engine. But if I had, it might have been less ground-breaking because better technology would have been available by the time I was born. I’m much better suited to what we’re making here!

Some of the world’s greatest production houses and companies have taken their name directly from their creators…

Desilu Productions was created by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, A&M Records was named after its founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss and the Ford Motor Company took its name from Henry Ford, himself. It stood to reason that our shiny, brand new media company should be named after its founders!

A combination of Louise Poole and Andy Le Roy.

Introducing…

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On second glance, maybe that wasn’t going to work after all.

So the search began for a name that was going to represent the ideals we are bringing to our new business. We wanted it to evoke a feeling of inclusivity and empowerment, without being flaky or aggressive. We plan to make content that inspires and entertains, like a breath of fresh air on the expansive sea of content now available.

There were too many contenders to mention as we rolled out our word-play skills, and then it came to us, like a magical ship in the night: Welcome Change Media.

It said everything about what we were looking for ourselves, and intend to bring for our audience and clients: a welcome change.

Now it was time to get some artwork happening to add to our brand’s identity. And we wanted business cards, stat!

For a radio announcer, Louise is extremely handy with her graphic design skills, and she came up with a few concepts to help us on our way. This is the one we adopted early on as a prototype:

No, the word “Andy” was not featured in the design… I was just too lazy to erase it from my screen capture.

Here’s where I started to channel every marketing hotshot from the 1980’s:

The moon motif represents the potential within all of us, and the striking feature of the gibbous waxing moon represents our positive creative potential. In fact, the gibbous section, features the letters WC. No no no, it doesn’t stand for water closet, it stands for ‘Welcome Change’

… or something like that.

We liked it, but there was a bit of a consensus brewing amongst our nearest and dearest that it was a little bit Moonfry-Childheart, and might not complete communicate our purpose, as much as we all love Punky Brewster. Although the changing phase of the moon was a step in the right direction, we thought.

Enter Fiverr! (not a sponsor)

We’re starting a new business and we want to put our best foot forward from the start, right? It’s glaringly obvious at this point that we’re going to need to invest in our baby (aka spend some money).

A word of advice when working with your Fiverr designer (best read aloud to take full advantage of the alliteration). Pictures may tell a thousand words, but well-targeted words will mean that you don’t get a thousand versions of the same picture. Having sent off our prototype to the designer for inspiration, telling them we weren’t married in any way to the moon (she’s spoken for!) the designer got to work. Turn around times were very quick and we were very forgiving of the first batch of designs, all of which contained moons. One of them even looked like a boho wedding motif, so if you’re looking to start that as your next business, we can recommend a great designer!

There was a developing theme in one of the designs that had something akin to a play button which we decided to explore a bit further. Alas, this only led to more moons. One of them looked like a sign pointing to the toilets due to the letters ‘WC’ swinging from the points of the triangle. We wondered about another of the iterations, and how it seemed to feature an unusual arrangement of sombreros. Then I tilted my head and realised the designer had added crescent moons to the three points of the triangle. They just didn’t get our vision, man!

No hard feelings, although the design company attached to the gig did delete our cancellation request twice before Fiverr stepped in and honoured it. We got up, dusted off our crescent moons and found a new designer, specifying in words only what we were after. They got it, and within a couple of revisions, we beheld our brand new logo…!