Hi, it’s Emma here…

At some point, the name of your business is as familiar to you as breathing, but in the early formative days trying to find a name that sums up everything you’re about feels like a game of ‘whack-a-mole”!

An idea floats to the surface or is snatched out of the air, and for five minutes, it’s the best idea you’ve ever had…and then, whack! The bubble is burst. Someone else has already trademarked it, the initials spell a rude word or any of a myriad of reasons to kick it to the discard heap.

Both Holly and I have produced magazines before (Holly with In the Country print Magazine and me with Hiho’s print Catapaper & digital Country Shows Journal), so we know that your vibe defines your tribe and we really wanted to come up with something that captured the spirit of what we’re about.

So, we did what I do with business owners every time I work with them, we started out by looking at our own values, our judgement of what’s important in life. We found that we personally have a lot of common values, which is a good basis to start from. We were also very aligned in terms of what we wanted to bring to the world.

We both wanted to do something that can help people on their journey, that reminds them that they’re not alone and that it is possible to climb the metaphorical mountain you’re sometimes facing, because others have been there before you. Something that celebrates success, shares wisdom and isn’t barriered by age.

So there we were, back in March 2023 sitting together in a Premier Inn at Solstice Services. We’d done all the background work and now we needed to put a name to this project that we were both so enthused about.

We threw a lot of names around the table, and in amongst it Holly suggested Country Woman, which landed well, but we both felt it wasn’t quite there. I’ll have to be honest, we were really struggling with it – going backwards and forwards, trying to get a name that really felt right to both of us.

So I suggested that we got our values sheet out and worked from there, what we’re about, what our message is – what does that make us, what are we trying to do?

We don’t have all the answers, we want to signpost to people who can help with answers or have been there, as well as share the tip, tricks and finds we discover along the way.

As we talked, we further refined our ideas and I suggested that we ourselves are going to be guides so should we not have that in our title?

It landed like finding water in the desert – Country Woman’s Guide, we loved it! We both tried it on, and it felt like it brought all the threads of what we’d been talking about together. We’d found our name!

We googled it; meanings, words, domains, anyone else using it- nope! We breathed a joint sigh of relief…

The google search pushed another refinement, we found that there was an actual definition of ‘countrywoman’ and it was so apt that we decided that was the word we would use.

With a momentous day in the bag for us both, we drove home, running the name round in our heads, trying it on, imagining it playing out…

The next day came, how were we feeling about it, did it pass the overnight mull test?

Yes! We were both still in love with it, we hadn’t managed to break the idea – we’d tried it on with friends, family and respected colleagues and their response was overwhelmingly positive.

So hello world, we are Holly and Emma and we’d like to introduce you to the Countrywoman’s Guide – and we very much hope that you will follow our journey and be inspired by the stories we share.

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