What’s in a name: How the We Think North team coined the name EntrepreNaari

Before we could give the audience a sense of the community, we first needed to understand it well ourselves. We set about figuring out what the community is, what its goals are and who it was catering to. 

We established that this would be an all-inclusive space that would provide every resource possible to budding women entrepreneurs and women-led businesses. We went further to also establish the audience base that it intended to reach. The goal of this community was to reach out to every woman with a business idea – whether they were from a privileged urban household, an underserved community, a rural area or anywhere else. They would not need to have perfect business acumen already or be fluent in English. As long as they had a business dream, they were welcome to this community.

Based on this understanding, we established certain parameters for the name:

• It should be self-explanatory 
• It should encompass all the values of the community
• It should have a pan-India appeal
• It should be simple enough to roll off the tongue
• It should be easily recallable 
• And (very importantly!) it should be translatable as a hashtag

After setting these parameters for ourselves, we moved on to the next step.

There were two approaches we had in mind. We could go with an exclusive club-like feel where women could gather to discuss business opportunities, not unlike those luxurious, exclusive business clubs you see in movies. 

This approach, however, went against the foundation of the community. The goal here was to extend support to women from everywhere – irrespective of their socio-economic conditions or communication ability. The last thing we would want is for entrepreneurship to be an intimidating prospect for anyone.

That is why we went with our second approach. We decided on a community that would exude a friendly, inclusive vibe to women everywhere. Here, to-be entrepreneurs would be given an equal footing with those who had already established businesses. Women would find understanding and support around their challenges, be it on the home front or anything else. This community would be a safe-space for women entrepreneurs in all spheres.

We understood the community. We knew the approach we wanted to take. Next came the brainstorming, which started with us throwing around words that best represented the community.

These words laid the foundation of the name. We also contemplated the type of name we wanted. Opting for something wordy or fancy would not fit within the inclusivity that is so important to the brand. We considered going for a ‘Hinglish’ word – something that would encapsulate the business aspect of the community within the more social aspect of it.

This was the experimentation phase. We went through multiple options, keeping in mind that no idea was a bad idea. Single-word names such as She-EO, Dream(h)her, went up on our virtual board, along with multiple-word names like Female Founders Club and Mahila Moguls. We also leaned into the Hinglish route, where we tried compounding various Hindi and English words. Some names that came out of this were EntrepreneAurat and EntrepreNaari.

Our parameters suggested a catchy, roll-off-your-tongue name. This meant many of our multiple word names, such as the Female Founders Club had to be taken out of the equation. We also eliminated the English-only names as we felt they didn’t capture the inclusivity we sought to convey. Ultimately, we narrowed it down to our two favourites Hinglish options – EntrepreneAurat and EntrepreNaari. Not only were these interesting, but they were also easily understandable and we thought they captured the essence of the brand quite well.

We landed on two great names, but now we also had to ensure their originality. We wouldn’t want to launch the community, only to realise that similar names already exist on the internet! 

We did a thorough trademark search through Google and used hashtag checkers on social media to analyse results. Our research showed that we were good to go with both the names we had picked when it came to uniqueness.

Both names were perfect for the brand identity we wanted to capture, and they both held a special place in our hearts. The last thing we wanted was to take a rash decision and pick the wrong one. So we decided to sleep on it. We took our time and worked on other aspects of the branding project in the meantime. After a day or two, we realised we kept coming back to EntrepreNaari. We felt this name encapsulated the spirit and cause of the community in one perfect word!

After landing on our perfect name, we had to present our idea to the teams at Aspire For Her and Project Naveli. While we were very confident with EntrepreNaari, we presented our other shortlists too and explained the reasoning behind them all. Each name had its own vision behind it, and we felt that EntrepreNaari had the strongest one. EntrepreNaari received the best response and was unanimously thought to be the strongest choice amongst all the other names. And with that, EntrepreNaari was finalised as the brand identity.

The brand success

EntrepreNaari quickly became one of the most successful communities for women entrepreneurship, garnering more than 3k members within the first month. Not only did the name create a lot of buzz, it also came to be used as a signifier of the women entrepreneurship movement itself. Various women-led businesses talked about their brand on Instagram, using the #EntrepreNaari hashtag. Many women referred to themselves as an EntrepreNaari. The community went on to be covered in multiple publications, and reached a massive milestone when it was talked about by Amitabh Bachchan on Kaun Banega Crorepati, thus reaching millions of viewers.

Today, it has over 21,000+ women members from all over the country, participating in the community and using its resources to grow their businesses exponentially. For Aspire For Her, Project Naveli and us at We Think North, this was never about solely creating a brand, but about creating a movement that would change the scope of women entrepreneurship in India. And we think we did that successfully with EntrepreNaari.