Company naming

What do they do?

Help businesses and individuals with the process of applying for visas to live and work in the UK

What did they need?

Baya were undertaking a full rebrand from their original identity. This process was being designed and managed by Lost & Found Creative, who brought us in specifically to look at renaming the business (formerly known as Immigration Joss, after the founder).

What did we do?

I took all the stakeholders through our well-honed naming process, looking first at naming types and selecting a couple that we felt would communicate the right type of sensibility for a brand which in one sense is highly people-oriented, but also needed to communicate process and structure.

As is often the case, I tried some different avenues, some worked, some didn’t, so we kept moving forward in quick, iterative refinements which is very much the hallmark of how we work to keep everyone creatively fresh and avoid people getting stuck in cognitive ruts!

It didn’t take long to hone in on the idea of “structures and frameworks” as a concept. I didn’t see those as being man-made, angular and harsh, I wanted to get across a more natural, holistic feel that suited a female-founded business, but without being overtly feminine.

And then my love of birds came to my aid! I was thinking about nests as a type of structure and my mind went back to seeing weaver bird nests in Africa. So I started looking at species names of weaver birds when I found the name… Baya.

And straightaway I loved the simplicity (which the name needed because it had to use the long suffix “immigration services”). I loved the way it sounded and even the shape of the next perhaps suggested a visual cue that Andy from Lost & Found could somehow work into the visual identity.

I was blown away when I saw where Lost & Found had taken that idea, it was so much cooler than I could ever have envisaged. But then perhaps they would have struggled without my spark of meaning in the name.

A really great example of how naming, messaging, and visual identity all inform each other in the branding process! A huge thank you to Andy Hussey at Lost and Found Creative for bringing Sufu into the project, a great collaboration and a fantastic new brand is born.