Salt shakes up brand name debate

By IRENE CHAPPLE

It's a discovery that's shaken up Auckland's salted design community.

Salt, the word, is trademarked. It has been since last year, by Salt Design.

Which means its salty colleagues in the industry have had to pull the seasoning from their names.

The discovery astounded 20-year-old artist Henoch Kloosterboer, who believed such a generic name would be difficult to trademark.

He's been running Salt Studios, which does corporate branding and communication, since 2001.

He wanted the use the word salt because of its reference in the Bible. "It talks about salt being a good thing. It adds flavour and keeps purity."

But after deciding to turn it into a limited liability company, Kloosterboer discovered a problem. .

Salt Design owned the name and was not amused by the sprinkling of other salts.

Stephen Hurdley, a director of Salt Design and a fan of salt's phonetics, said the multitude of salted design companies led to confusion. He receives emails meant for other salts and says "it's just a pain in the ass".

There was the former Salt Print Solutions, now Pepper Print Solutions, Salt Advertising and Marketing and Salt New Media, both of which are in the process of changing their names after the word from Salt Design.

John Chambers, who is a director of all three companies, said rebranding Salt Print Solutions had probably cost between $10,000 and $15,000, taking into account the loss of the original brand's goodwill.

"We were reluctant to give away salt," says Chambers.

He liked it because of the "salt of the earth" ideas it conjured. But pepper, well, that "just appeared", said Chambers. "It doesn't matter. Pepper is a catchy name."

As for Kloosterboer, he's just changed the name of his studio too.

Now it's called Zout Studios, the Dutch word for salt.

And he's happy. Despite a "write-off" of the advertising for Salt Studios, Zout has "more impact", he says. 'It's more catchy."