Why Kerika?

I often get asked what "Kerika" means, and why I chose it as the name for the company.

Well, as far as I know, Kerika doesn't mean anything -- at least not in English. As I mentioned in my last post, the original Kerika logo was a drawing of two flowers. Some rather insecure men thought this was too effiminate a symbol (!!), so I decided to come up with a company name that had some "hard" sounds in it: like a "K" or "G" that could help balance the logo.

My first choice was the word "Kalista". I was working with Polopoly in Stockholm at the time I decided to form the company (I used to be on their board of directors), and they had a receptionist named Kalista. I liked the sound, but unfortunately I couldn't get the domain name; turned out Kalista is a fairly popular Greek name.

Back in the US I tried playing with various anagrams of my family's names. My wife's name is Rika, and my daughter's name is Erika, following a pattern we had set earlier by naming my son Arjun (get it?)

One of the anagrams that came up was Kerika. The domain name was available, and when I tried a quick search on Google it didn't seem to have any negative connotations, although I can't be completely sure of that: it may have some meaning in Malay or Indonesian.

In marketing terms, what I did was use a word that I could "fill with meaning" because, at least in English, "Kerika" had no meaning to start with. This approach can work well when you are going to produce a product that is unlike anything that came before: you want a clean break with the past in terms of the branding and messaging so that you can position your new creation with encumbrances.