ko&co.
For those who know me, the “ko” is obvious. Kendra Overall. KO. As a kid, my initials came with the bonus ‘knockout’ meaning, which I accepted with the dignity of the kid who got handed the better initials. My brother got BO. Sometimes parents don’t consider all aspects of naming their child.
For ko&co as a business, once you get where ko comes from, that’s that. Done. Most people never ask about the &co.
Not because the &co is hidden. It’s sat there since day one, doing nothing to disguise itself. Most people like the rhythm of ko&co and leave it there, which is fair enough. Others assumed co meant coworking, because that’s what had walls, a street address, and a coffee machine we all adored.
I knew what &co stood for the whole time, but I never corrected or told anyone. It didn’t seem to matter. However, while coworking ran for about a year, the assumption about the business name stuck around much longer.
When the room closed, there was nothing left for &co to physically point at. I had to say what &co meant. Out loud. and not let an obvious answer in clients’ or the audience’s minds keep doing the job for me.
&co was never short for coworking. In ko&co it stands for company, collaboration, co-creation.
If you don’t correct it, and the business needs to shift, the story doesn’t shift with it. It continues to point at something that isn’t there anymore, still doing the explaining, except now it’s explaining the wrong thing, and you’re the only one who knows.
That’s the risk. It doesn’t take long for a convenient story to take hold. It takes a lot longer to put it right.
Names are funny things.
And not just because of my own name – KO, Kendra the vampire slayer and even more annoying, Kendra from the Playboy bunnies. All a conversation for another day.
Take Textas. Most Australians know what a Texta is. I used the word without thinking on a conference call once, with a client based in Hong Kong. Complete blank. Not because they didn’t know what markers were. They had no idea what I was asking for. A word so embedded in my world that it had stopped being a brand name entirely. It had become the thing itself.
Turns out it travels as far as the people who grew up with it. Queensland didn’t even get Textas. They got Nikkos. Same pen, different word, because a different brand got there first.
Omo has been in Australian laundry cupboards for as long as most of us can remember. Nobody buying it has ever stopped to wonder what the name means. It stands for Old Mother Owl. A wise purchase.
That meaning has been completely replaced by ‘dirt is good’, built not by the word but by everything poured into it over decades. The owl is long gone, but the name is still a household name.
Yeti makes premium coolers and drinkware. Before Yeti, nothing about a mystical snow creature said “serious outdoor gear worth paying a lot of money for.” And yet it does now because two brothers decided that’s what it meant and held the line until the market caught up. No owl. No explanation. Just conviction, consistently applied.
None of those names explains itself. None of them needed to. The meaning came from the work done around them, not from the word itself. The name was always just the vessel.
Your turn.
Your business name is doing the same job. Every time someone says it on your behalf, before they’ve seen anything you’ve made, before they’ve read your website or sat in a meeting with you, your name is out there, carrying whatever meaning you’ve put into it. Or whatever meaning someone else decided on, because you hadn’t got around to it yet.
So if asked, would I survive the question ‘what does ko&co mean?’ Easily, I’ve always known. Should I have corrected people and built more meaning around it at the start? Absolutely.
When did you last think about what your own business name commits you to? Not whether it’s catchy. Not whether the domain was free. What it’s quietly promising every time someone says it back to you or another person, including the parts you’ve let people get wrong because correcting them didn’t seem worth it.
Most founders can tell you why they picked their name. Often, we can’t say what it’s holding us to, or how long we’ve let assumptions stand in for the real brand story. That’s usually where the brand wobbles. Not the logo. The stories, voice and tone everyone assumes. Including you.
Start here
If you’ve never been asked what your own name means or commits you to, Brand Therapy is where you find out. Therapy for you and your brand, without the couch.
