Get Your Ideas All Up in My Business!

All right, my darlings, it’s now less than two weeks until the day I hang up my shingle, and I haven’t got any idea what name to put on it. Well, I have a few ideas. You may have better ones. Think!

Image is a black cat in a suit. Caption says, "We need to think inside all the boxes."
Think of names for a store selling all sorts of geology-themed thingies. And you know I like a nice Spanish flavor. Something like… Mercado Geológica, f’r instance. Mega Mercado de la Verdad? Give me ideas! I rather suck at naming things. One of you has to be better.

Some of you may want to help out, but come up just as blank as I do on names. No problemo! You know what else you can do? Let me know what kind of products you’d like to see. I’m going to be opening up a store on Cafe Press or Zazzle or Red Bubble or some site like that, maybe more than one – what sort of stuff do you want me to put up there?

I’ll be doing some crafty sorts of things and selling them through Etsy. That store will include things like my scarves, mufflers, wraps, hair wraps, scrunchies, and such. Anyone interested in handkerchiefs or other simple little fabric things? I can do simple bags, throw pillows, pillow cases, and things like that. I’ll also be doing custom work, so if you need something done, hit me up for an estimate. I might be able to save you a ton of money on curtains, for instance. And if you have a bit of fabric needing turned in to something, let me know.

Outside of sewing, would you go in for hand-collected pebbles for fountains, Zen gardens for your desk, rock sample magnets, things like that? Would you like me to look in to what it would take to make and sell coal and rock candy?

I’ll be looking in to getting some necessary items soon, too. If any of you has a used rock tumbler that works well and is in good condition you’d like to sell, let me know.

Now, on to writing, which will be the main focus of this whole enterprise: I am most definitely doing the Mount St. Helens book so many of you have requested! Two, in fact: the one about the May 1980 eruption, and I’m going to also do a geology travel guide. Probably more than one, now I’ll have time to investigate the other roads to the mountain! And I’m hoping to write up the more recent dome-building eruption, too.

I’m also writing a geological guide to Discovery Park, a book on women in the geosciences, and will be collecting and expanding some of the best posts from both ETEV and Rosetta Stones.

I’ve got a ton of other things planned, but your ideas are always welcome, so if there’s a bit of geology (or any other subject) you’ve been wanting me to do a post on, let me know.

All right, I’m off to begin putting the house in some semblance of order. Hit me with all your suggestions and demands!

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Get Your Ideas All Up in My Business!
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25 thoughts on “Get Your Ideas All Up in My Business!

  1. 1

    Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who have never learned any Spanish, nor any other Latin-based language. So while a title with a Spanish theme may sound fun, and sounds very natural in the west and southwest, it might not work for everyone. You might have to choose whether your top priority for a business name is to please yourself, or to make it easier for all of your natural potential customer base to find you.

    I would suggest that you make a name from two or three of the natural English words that you might predict would be most commonly used in a web search for a store like yours. First brainstorm a list of all the likely search terms, and then try to make a pair or trio that sounds appropriate. There will be plenty of other places to put in a bilingual or transnational approach, which will be a good thing. But in the modern era, people will want names they can find, understand, and remember. Imagine a kid in 9th grade doing a web search for items to expand on a class discussion, and she’s trying to tell her busy mom or dad where to go on the web to find the cool stuff. It needs to make sense in the K-12 educational market, as well as the toy, college, and enthusiast markets, plus for general life-long learning contexts.

    You can do web searches today to try to find potential competitors, and when you do that, you will think of more word cloud terms than we can. And when you do a follow-up post with your top few combinations, and what you like about each of them, you’ll get a much better cloud-sourced result from us. So I think you’re on the right track, but don’t doubt your own abilities to know this field, and the cool terms that can make people connect field work, natural disasters, and metric tons of fun. I’m looking forward to it.

  2. 2

    Teh kitty says we need to think *inside* the boxes. I hope that’s not inside the kitty litter boxes. I didn’t scoop mine before bed, so they’re a bit crappy.

    How about something similar to your blog? I know about this >.< much Spanish, so I don't know how the translation would be, but how about 'Tequila is the Bedrock'?

  3. 6

    You could be Vucanovia, the Place for All Things Eruptive. See if you can get samples of lava to post to customers. Knit your own volcano.
    .
    .
    otrame

    Or maybe the Rock and the Soft place?

    No, oh no, not that.

  4. 7

    I am very much looking forward to your Mount St. Helens book (about the eruption). I’ve read other accounts of it, but your writing style in your SA series is absolutely a treat.

    My son is showing an interest in rocks and geology (he’s 9). Last week he came home from the library with an armload of books, hoping to learn how to identify rocks he finds. Its seems though that there is a gap in available books – there are lots of books of pretty pictures with labels, and beginnig geology books with slices of the earth and so on, but what seems to be missing is a book that talks about how you might go about identifying rocks you find in your yard or on various trips. It’s what he was looking for and he was getting frustrated not being able to find any. And I’m not much help, my own knowledge base lies elsewhere.

  5. 10

    “cantante de roca” is a pun in Spanish, meaning “rock singer” but with an actual rock.

    But, I agree with brucemartin that most of your prospective customers won’t get the joke, and may not even look at a site with a Spanish name, unless we can think of some hilariously obvious Spanglish.

  6. 13

    Tectónica, Sierra Madre, Las Entrañas de la Tierra (Earth’s Entrails), Xisto, Granito, Marble, Pinatubo, Lava, Quartzo, Feldspato y Mica (the composition of granite), Subducción.

  7. 15

    I once toyed with the idea of making and selling turquoise jewelry, and I was going to call the business La Presea Azul. Presea means gem, treasure, or prize. So you’re welcome to that, if you like.

  8. 16

    Actually, I do need curtains, but kinda big ones. I have two sliding glass doors with really crappy curtains. One curtain would need to be about 8 feet high and 7 wide, and the other would be roughly 8 feet by 9 feet. Is that doable, Dana?

  9. 17

    I had half a dozen PERFECT ideas while I was off-line. Not now, of course. The only ones I can remember are:
    Thinking outside the rox.
    Thinking inside the rox.
    A stone’s throw….
    Ricther Sales

    Kitties Rock!

  10. 22

    You could use ‘Dana Hunter’. It seems like a good idea to make it easy for people to connect your geological crafts with your geological books. I thought of ‘Sewing unconformity’ but that might be more of a mission statement than a business name…

    Here’s something I would like to see. Geological maps recreated in textiles – I can explain more if you’re interested (where can I email you?). I guess I’m angling more towards ‘nerd art’ than crafty things with a geological theme.

  11. 24

    Suggestion for one product idea – geological map jigsaws where the units of rock in the proper geological colours and symbols are actually the pieces of a jigsaw?

    Also maybe a geological globe of the Earth and perhaps even a gravity map exxagerated geoid globe :

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThcMzqlSwYo

    to make people rethink and help them learn the maps and a few odd facts!

    Also posters and books are always good. Cannot wait to buy and read your Mt St Helen’s eruption one. Tea cup designs, tea-towels and things like that are nice possibilities too aren’t they?

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