what's in a {business} name

a few folks have asked me how i came up with the company name calliespondence.  {it’s a play on “correspondence” if you have not figured that out yet.}  i must tell the truth - i did not come upon it myself.  after i graduated from the university of georgia (go dawgs) in 2002, i moved to san diego, california with four girlfriends.  it was such fun.  we didn’t know a soul and had zero job leads.  actually, one friend secured an unpaid internship before arriving - but does that really count?  anyway.  the rest of us reported to a local temp agency to find work, i think on day three of living there.  I wonder why we were so industrious – did I mention we lived across the street from the beach?? 

here are a few pictures of the "georgia girls" as we were called, traveling everywhere in a big pack...the group evolving over time as people came and went...

we had this great idea of getting a christmas card picture to send to the folks back home - we would all be standing on the beach with our toes in the water, wearing white shirts with some kind of colored pants/skirt and santa hats.  it would have been so cute until a tsunami wave came up behind where we were standing in the surf posing and soaked us all.  nice. (l-r: brooke, merrell, anne and me)

brooke and i ran our first half marathon together...and i had trained for the race with anne but she unfortunately obtained an injury two weeks before the race.  sweet brooke said that she was not going to let me run alone - so she hopped to it and got in gear to run alongside me!!  i have the best friends.

here we are cheering on the dawgs with the UGA alumni group after a win.  i remember 2002 being a good season...but isn't anything compared to 6-6? :)

a couple of gals deserted us for georgia after a year or so, so thank goodness for new friends!  this was on a getaway to mexico.  (l-r: brin, giovanna, heidi, brooke and me)

ok, back to temping.  having obtained a finance degree, i was placed at LPL - a private brokerage firm in la jolla (the not pretty part of la jolla - don't think for a second my office was overlooking the cove or any sort of water at all).  i spent my days doing data entry...and wondering why the heck i got a degree in finance and not something cool like journalism or advertising.  surely THOSE people were not spending their days updating addresses from returned mail.  at any rate, my buddy frank seeley worked there in the sea of cubes and he was really funny.  we would email back and forth about random office goings-on, assigning all of our co-workers nicknames and other very important topics.  LPL actually offered me a full time job doing something in the same department, which I promptly turned down and got placed at another brokerage firm where I did another kind of data entry, this time with dividend amounts.  awesome.  so can you blame me for fleeing the financial services coop and running into the arms of a small landscape architecture firm where I did marketing, PR, answered phones, filed and got coffee for people? 

oh right, the name.  so frank told me that he kept all of our cross-cube emails in a folder in his inbox called “calliespondence.”  isn’t that clever?  and that my friends, is where I got the name for this little business.  thank you FRANK!  i owe it all to you.

we joked in san diego about me opening up a stationery store called calliespondence (you see, i've always been obsessed with paper).  but when i took the leap into this crazy venture - i did not waste one minute trying to think of a name.  that part was already done!

xo