In legal terms, the company was established six years ago, and initially the main concern was the product: what to manufacture and how. In order to be successful, we chose initially to specialise in one particular thing and thus become noticed, become recognised by our quality, by our chair models and our name. We chose chairs, as the most utilised article of furniture, and the factory making them specialises in using bent glued materials, which are particularly suitable for chair manufacture.
Logically, the need arose for a company name. Nobody had any experience in this regard, and the name BFDF was generated in collaboration with the Norwegian design office Circus Design. It was intended to encapsulate as much information as possible about who we are and what we do. We should remember that, back then, Latvia was a country unknown to the world at large, and nobody was coming to see furniture exhibitions in Latvia or work with our designers. A new, unknown company in an unfamiliar market. Initially, we chose four long words: Baltic Furniture Design Factory. This says it all: we’re from the Baltic, we’re a furniture design factory and we develop furniture design. Back in those days, inclusion of the word “Baltic” in the name was a bold step. It’s hard to say whether it actually helped us, but to this day we’re proud that we come from this region and that we’re still first. Today we may look at it as an asset, but at the beginning it was a risk. That was back in 2000, when the Baltic States certainly did not yet have a mark of trustworthiness. Initially we were in the role of messengers showing a map. In the present situation, the name “Baltic” even adds interest, but back then an easier approach would have been to choose an Italian- or Scandinavian-sounding name. But in that case we’d have lost our identity, which we continue to emphasise, even after the change of name. Long names tend to change into acronyms. BFDF is easy to say for Latvians; it stays in people’s minds, and in Latvia it was well accepted. But we have partners in many countries of the world, including Japan and France, where people weren’t able to pronounce the acronym. At that point, when you notice several times that people can’t remember the long name and can’t say the short one, then you come to realise that, if your customer can’t recall your name, then that’s a bad sign. We started thinking about it a year ago, before actually starting to implement the name change. When we started out, there were several preconditions: first, the name should be one that people in all countries could pronounce; secondly, it should sound good. When we started working with the graphic design company Mollerup Designlab, we followed the approach “To be different”. It’s important to be different in the logo in all aspects – in terms of the symbol, its form and colour. In the furniture industry, companies tend to use stable colours: black, white, grey, red – this seems to guarantee trust in quality.
When we started working with the graphic designers, we met several times to discuss the company’s strategy for the next five to ten years, and that was the starting point for the designers’ assignment. Our only demand was to leave “Baltic” in the new name. We’ve defined in our company’s strategic document that we also wish to differ in that we love our clients, which is why we create functional, comfortable chairs. The designers proposed that we should also differ in terms of colour, and then we’ll be remembered. Perhaps some day we’ll be so stable and known that we can remove the company name from the logo, leaving only the letter “C” – that’s the long-term plan.
During the past six years, we’ve put the emphasis on the chairs, each of which is created as a recognisable brand. In working with the new name, we’ll also devote more energy to enhancing international awareness of the company’s name Chair Baltic.