I’ve been noticing a mini-trend in corporate naming: personal names. The names are usually (but not always) female, and they’re often a little old-fashioned. At their best, they add emotional appeal, humanize a company – especially a technology company whose actual workings may be opaque – and make a brand seem like a friend or family member.
Here are some of the personal names I’ve been tracking:
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Spotted in San Francisco’s Financial District:
Vornado Realty Trust, Montgomery Street.
Spotted in my storage closet:
Vornado whole-room air circulator, acquired during an unfortunate mildew episode.
The name duplication isn’t coincidental. The two brands are related.
Vornado fans were first manufactured toward the end of World War II; the inventor of the original technology, an Oklahoma man named Ralph K. Odor (really), had started experimenting in the 1920s with improved airplane-propeller efficiency. In 1931 he introduced the Vornado Plane.
Ralph Odor’s 1931 test flight of the Vornado, via YouTube.
The Vornado name comes from “vortex action” plus a suffix, probably from “tornado.” (A 1936 news account of the plane said it would “roar through the skies on the wings of a span of man-made tornadoes.”)
In the 1940s Odor partnered with a Kansas entrepreneur, O.A. Sutton, and after the war ended the O.A. Sutton Corporation produced the first Vornado fans. Odor quit not long afterward over a patent-rights dispute, and the O.A. Sutton Corporation went bankrupt in the 1950s. The Vornado brand and company were resurrected in Andover, Kansas, in 1989.
As for Vornado Realty Trust, it traces its history to an appliance chain originally called Two Guys from Harrison, founded in 1946 by brothers Sidney and Hubert Hubschman of Harrison, New Jersey. In 1959, Two Guys bought the defunct O.A. Sutton Corporation and renamed the merged company Vornado. At the company’s peak, according to a Wikipedia entry, there were more than 100 Two Guys locations nationwide. Profits began declining in the 1970s, and in 1980, Vornado was acquired by Interstate Department Stores, Inc., which changed its name to Vornado Realty Trust and began selling the retail stores and leasing their physical locations.
Today, Vornado Realty Trust is a publicly traded company and one of the largest owners and managers of commercial real estate in the United States. And Vornado fans for home, business, and industrial use are sold at Sears, Costco, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and other retailers worldwide.
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Now that home-economics classes have been relegated to the dustbin of history and modern clothes dryers are equipped with an “ironing” setting, does anyone iron clothes anymore? Not from the looks of it, according to my highly subjective survey-by-looking-around. My findings were confirmed by a Writer’s Beat discussion forum, which tipped its hand by asking, “Why do people iron their clothes?” Representative response: “If god wanted us to iron, why make clothes with Dry Clean Only labels?” And a bit further off topic: “If you spray Pam on an iron you can make really great grilled cheese sandwiches with it.”
Well, I think ironing is important, and I enjoy doing it; in fact, it’s my favorite household chore. Also, as regular readers know, I like a good man-brand. (See my posts on ManQuarium, MANdle candles, and manscaping.) So it was with considerable interest that I read a recent Jezebel post about the Man Iron, aka the GC4490, from Philips, the Dutch electronics manufacturer.
The Man Iron: how Darth Vader maintains his wrinkle-free appearance?
The Jezebel post refers to a testosterone-drenched press release for the iron (“robust black casing …. exudes masculinity … practically unbreakable … crushes the opposition … intense 100g of steam … bulldozing [!] creases”). However, the post lacks a link to that press release, so I couldn’t verify its accuracy.* Nor could I find it on the Philips website. I did find a PDF of the product manual which calls the GC4490 an “anodilium soleplate man iron for an endless excellent gliding experience.” (I think Philips made up “anodilium”—I found a cancelled trademark filing for the term in the USPTO database.) The product manual also refers to the GC4490 as a “2400 W power tool for ironing” that “helps you blast all creases away easily.” I counted eight references to “power” or “powerful.”
The GC4490 was introduced in Europe last year; a May 2010 report in Springwise.com noted that the iron comes in a solid case “like a new hammer drill” and retails for about €80 ($96). Last week’s flurry of coverage by Jezebel and other outlets seems to portend a US debut, but I didn’t see the product in Philips’s online store.
Naturally, the Man Iron news has prompted some Iron Man word play as well as some scoffing. Here’s Glamour.com’s Tracey Lomrantz:
I find this almost as ridiculous as “Safety Girl” tools, which make home improvement so much more fun because they’re pink! For the record, I learned to iron from a former boyfriend and my dad handles most of the wrinkle-releasing duties at my parents’ house, and they both managed just fine without the premium sports car of steaming.
Sex-role stereotyping aside, what to say about the Man Iron name? It’s certainly consistent with a naming trend that began in 1969 with Hunt-Wesson’s Manwich. (I wrote about Manwich and its namer, ad man Edward Gelsthorpe, for the Visual Thesaurus back in 2009.) Man-brands and coined man-words—from Seinfeld’s mansierre and man-fur to Borat’s mankini and the U.S. economy’s mancession—serve a couple of purposes. As language maven Mark Peters has observed, “most man words are coined to describe men behaving like women, or at least stereotypical women. Men aren't supposed to worry about cancer, receive alimony, or get Brazilian waxes, so manogram, manimony, and manzilian”—and Man Iron—“are created.” Man-words are also a jokey way to relieve tension—to say, in effect, “Dude, why so serious?”
I do think, though, that Philips missed an opportunity to revive the ultimate in high-performance de-wrinkling technology: the electric mangle.
Mangle photograph from here.
A mangle presses fabric between heated rollers; it’s a staple of commercial laundries but used to be made for household use, too. (In fact, Miele still makes a home mangle but calls it a “fold-down rotary iron”; at $1,999, it requires a major commitment to crispness.)
The pressing-type mangle is unrelated, etymologically, to the verb meaning “to mutilate or disfigure; to ruin.” The verb comes from Old French mangoner, “to cut to bits.” The noun comes from Dutch and Middle High German and ultimately from Late Latin manganum. Here’s the wonderfully relevant part: manganum means “catapult” and derives from Greek manganon, “war machine.” Besides “mangle,” manganon gave us “mangonel,” “a military engine used during the Middle Ages for hurling stones and other missles.”
Need I point out that the first syllable of all these words is man?
The mangle: an industrial-strength answer to a man-sized problem. Gentlemen, start your crease-bulldozing engines.
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* UPDATE: I am now in possession of the original Philips press release and can confirm every word. Unfortunately, the release is in Word so I can’t link to it.
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P.S. If you really want to get serious about it, buy Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, by Cheryl Mendelson, which devotes an entire chapter to the science and craft of ironing. Ms. Mendelson, who lives in New York City with her husband and son, has a PhD in philosophy and a Harvard law degree and still found time to write—elegantly and persuasively—an 896-page guide to contemporary housekeeping. From the introduction to the chapter on ironing: “There is nothing like keeping the hands busy with some familiar work to free the mind. You can learn Italian while you iron, as a friend of mine did, or you can simply think.”
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My coffeemaker broke. It was a no-name freebie, a long-ago inducement to buy Gevalia coffee. (I bought just enough coffee to get the coffeemaker, then quit the subscription program. Sorry, Gevalia.) I was reduced to consuming my emergency supply of Starbucks Via, which I’d been saving for the Big One.
I needed a replacement, stat.
I didn’t want a French press: I’d tried one and disliked the results (lukewarm, gritty). I didn’t want a cappuccino-espresso maker. I didn’t want one of those trendy single-serve K-cup models, which strike me as absurdly wasteful, especially if you want a little bit more than a single cup every morning. I didn’t want a 15-cup behemoth suitable for a medium-size office.
I wanted something compact, efficient, effective, and not too expensive.
One of my Twitter pals recommended a Braun four-cup model, but it seems to have been discontinued. Someone else recommended Technivorm, a Dutch brand I was tempted to buy on the basis of its name alone, but the smallest model costs $280, which is about four times more than I was willing to part with.
So I asked Amazon to suggest a four- or five-cup automatic coffeemaker with high marks from reviewers. And Amazon replied: “Zutto.”
I was intrigued. I’d never heard of Zutto, but I was charmed by the name. (I’ll get back to the name in a minute.) A little research revealed that the appliance’s Japanese manufacturer, Zojirushi*, was founded in 1918, which reassured me. Amazon gave the model I was considering, the EC-DAC50**, a solid four-star rating based on 124 reviews. Zojirushi also makes the much better-known Air Pot push-top beverage dispenser. And—whaddya know!—Zojirushi America Corporation is right down the road in Union City, California, in case I ever needed parts or service.
I’ll cut to the happy ending: I received my Zutto coffeemaker two days after I placed the order, immediately set it up, admired its handsome looks, and made a test pot. Excellent. Even with $7.99-a-pound Trader Joe’s coffee.
My new Zutto EC-DAC50.
But you didn’t come here for a coffee review. You came here to find out why the Zutto name works so well.
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