our dark secret

We have something to share with you. We were going to try to keep it a secret forever but in the long run, it's better to share.

We used to be called Fast Tractor. Before we were innocent, the name of our smoothie company was Fast Tractor. We could go into a long-winded argument about why we chose that name and why it would have worked, but actually, thinking about it, if we'd stuck with Fast Tractor, I'm not entirely sure that we'd still be selling smoothies today.

Here's what the label looked like:

It had a big picture of a Fast Tractor on it. That's all we want to say right now.

Comments

[Ben]

Is that for real?

[dan at innocent]

It's for real. We never got to the stage where Fast Tractor was in the shops, but it was a close call. Lesson one - never name your company/drink after farm machinery.

[Frankie Roberto]

Hmm, this doesn't sound that real to me either (a hoax?), but then, strange things happen.

How did you choose the name Innocent? Million-pound marketing job, or employee with a brainwave?

[dan at innocent]

It's true. Not a hoax. We'd have saved it for April 1st if that was the case.

As for choosing the name innocent, it was pretty simple. Rich, Jon and Adam sat down with a big list of words and picked the one that worked best. No million pounds, no brainwaves. Just a good old-fashioned last minute panic.

[Ben]

Fast Tractor is brilliant. I think you've just spawned a new lot of D&AD case studies...

[Adam]

How retro looking is that?! I really like it though.

Oh, and 'Contains a barnful of Vitamin C' - nice touch ;)

[Polly]

Its amazing what directions images and marketing can take you.

I like the name innocent- it simply sounds unique, however an ex-colleague of mine didn't want to be associated with hippy healthy things like innocent and lush cosmetics for example and stuck to her fags, coffee and chemicals.

Buying is about aspirations and image. So you can't really entice everyone.

But I do love you xxx

[Jin]

i can not think of any existing linking between 'Fast Tractor' and smoothie, but Innocent is a much better name which is relevant to your promise of 100% pure,never X, never Y, and Never Z.

[Gowan]

If you had remained Fast Tractor then your publishing exploits might have gone in a different direction

http://www.felixthefasttractor.co.uk/

[Philippe]

That's really incredible. We are a Swiss company producing organic Smoothies and we are called Traktor (tractor in German). We had no idea that anyone else had come up with this equally strange name for a smoothie. There must be some strange telepathy going on between Innocent and Traktor ;-)

[dan at innocent]

Hello Philippe. Great minds think alike. Your smoothies look good - nice labels. Hope I get to taste them one day.

[Sarah]

We ran a couple of articles in Design Week a few years ago where Richard Reed himself said an agency called Deepend did your brand and logo in return for shares? Is that correct? You don't seem to credit them anywhere?

[dan germain]

Hello Sarah

The story is that the name 'innocent' came from us (actually via Rich (founder) going through the thesauruses in Huddersfield town library).

It's no secret that our logo was designed by Gravy at Deepend. Gravy doodled on a piece of paper in front of us in response to our brief 'we just need a face with a halo above it', and we looked at his first sketches and said 'that's it'.

We agreed that Deepend would provide us the first 18 months of design services in return for them getting 2% equity, but Deepend went bust so the equity reverted back to us.

Hope that helps.

Dan