Since I started the brand, lots of people have asked where the name Wild Fawn came from (they genuinely have though, this isn't one of those captions on instagram where people say 'lots of you are asking where I got my dress from') so I thought it might be nice to do a little write up about it.
So, when I started making jewellery as a hobby, I didn't even have a name because I never imagined actually becoming a 'brand'. But when I started to have spare materials, I thought I'd try selling some designs on Etsy to pay for my new hobby. Then came the dreaded question on the set-up form 'Shop Name?'... I honestly had to think about it for a couple of weeks before I could complete it as I knew how important a memorable name was. The pressure was just too much!
I eventually came up with a name - which I then changed to Wild Fawn (10 points if you know what it was originally, it's too embarrassing to write down here). The old name used to bug me and it was on New Years Day 2015 when (very hungover) I was chatting to my partner and her mum about how I wanted to change the name to represent the ethical and eco-friendly side of the business. It needed to be 'natural and earthy' but without sounding too cliché. The word Wild was thrown out there, which I loved and it stuck, but Wild what? Genuinely, at that very moment, a deer appeared on the far side of the field you could see out of the kitchen window and the name Wild Fawn was born. Hallelujah! It was fate.
The re-naming was a whole new chapter for me; I had the confidence to shout about the brand, set up my facebook page and started applying to markets. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until it dawned on me that I would need a logo, the fear of it having to be perfect crept right back in and I couldn't settle on a design. It wasn't until I was at a Crafty Fox market in Peckham that the logo was literally presented to me on a brown paper bag.... My partner had been helping me set up and had, unbeknownst to me, drawn the Wild Fawn logo as it is now about 100 times on paper bags for me to use for customers' orders (100 times, bit ambitious for a first market..). I saw it and knew that was the logo!
The photo below from the Wild Fawn instagram in April 2015 is the very market that the logo was created. So it took me a good 4 months from thinking of the name to settling on the logo design.
I kept one of the bags, scanned it onto my computer, and used a dodgy free editing tool to try to make the background white and the text and circle around it a solid black. A good few hours later, I had a very rudimentary, very pixelated logo that I somehow managed to pull off for a couple of years before Rebecca spruced it up a little, smoothed the lines and reformatted it. If you look at it now (the circle version) the circle is still the very same pen line as the original one on the brown paper bag which I absolutely love.
Looking back at the set up of my old jewellery bench (gifted from the amazing Charlotte Bezzant Jewellery) in my flat in Tooting Bec makes the move into our new studio even more of a personal milestone. It's in that flat the logo was drawn and it goes to show that starting a brand from scratch gives opportunities for the whole process to be really meaningful. It makes me even more proud of where Wild Fawn is now.
Emma x