Fruitful Logo

Fruitful is the company I’m co-founder of. We’ve built a product that enables people to lend directly to mortgage borrowers.

The Problem

When I joined the company, it was incorporated as Crowd Mortgage Limited. Shortly after I joined, we made an application to trademark the name.

The Trademark Office came back to us with a rejection letter. There was a firm in our sector with a similar name (and much more resources — should they have needed to field a legal case against us).

I was never wedded to the name Crowd Mortgage. With the proliferation of crowd funding, there’s been a mountain of new firms branding themselves as CrowdX / CrowdY / CrowdZ.

On top of this, I’ve never been a fan of descriptive brand names. As soon as you decide to call your firm Dave’s Ladders, it’s tricky to start selling windows under that moniker.

I prefer picking a name that’s less descriptive — something that you can load your own meaning into.

2 Days of Brainstorming

Thumbs up / Thumbs down

We listed brand names we liked. We listed brand names we thought were disgusting.

![Photo of the lists we made]

We liked the idea of something organic sounding — something that echoed letting your investment grow, getting a healthy deal.

We really liked Fruitful.

fruitful |
adjective (of a tree, plant, or land) producing much fruit; fertile. this seed will grow into a lovely fruitful tree.
producing good or helpful results; productive: memoirs can be a fruitful source of information.
(of a person) producing many offspring. and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply. be happy, be fruitful.

fruitful.com Was Not Available

As a workaround, we decided to prepend love to fruitful for:

• lovefruitful.com on the web
• @lovefruitful on Twitter
• and facebook.com/lovefruitful

To Fruit or Not to Fruit?

Here are some of the quick iterations we went through.

Growing Fond

We all liked the quick sketch that I made using FiftyThree’s excellent Paper for iPad.

We decided to move forward with this concept — using the wonderful Johnston typeface to accompany the geometric mark.

Style Tiles

Review

• We successfully rolled-out the branding across the website, product and printed materials.
• The simple mark works well at both large small sizes.
• We liked our new identity =)