Old name led to a “word-of-mouth” issue for company.
Technology-driven real estate startup TripleMint just raised $1.65 million from investors. It’s also changing its name from one that caused it problems.
TripleMint used to be called Suitey, a name that I don’t know how to say, and if someone told me about it I wouldn’t know how to spell it. My guess is it was a play on “sweetie” and the real estate context of “suite”.
Co-founder David Walker explained that the old name was “really hard to say and spell,” creating “a bit of a word-of-mouth issue.”
Indeed, TripleMint is a lot cleaner and I can’t think of alternative spellings. (Triple Mint is a real estate term, kind of like Triple Premium is in the domain name business.)
A BuzzFeed article explains that the new name has its own issue, though. It’s also the name of a real estate brokerage in Austin. Although the recently funded startup owns TripleMint.com, the Austin firm has the matching twitter handle.
(Thanks Bill.)
The new name isn’t much better than their old name. It’s interesting to me how these folks who obviously know very little about branding are able to raise millions in capital.
FWIW: I’ve been a real estate broker for 20+ years, I have personally bought and sold over 30 pieces of real estate (residential and commercial), and I have never uttered nor heard anyone in the real estate industry use the term “Triple Mint”…it is an “epic-fail” of a business name.
30 pcs of real estate sales in over 20 yrs
You would be better off working for McDonald’s flipping hamburgers
So they go to all the effort necessary to rebrand and the best they can do is a name that another real estate company is already using ? I can’t tell if this is a tragical or comical story Andrew.
When I first saw the name Suitey, I said to myself “suit-ee?” Yeah, not a good spelling.