Danny Lenihan lets us in on the tripod naming process of 3 Legged Thing.
In the early days of our existence, our focus was on creating points of difference – not necessarily unique selling points (USPs) – but actual differences between us and the established brands that dominated our market.
I’d spent some time wading through the treacle of competition and working to create something truly splendid that both outperformed and looked better than those well-known products that everyone seems to buy “because they’ve heard of it”.
We hadn’t got very far down the track of brand identity, having barely given ourselves a name, when an innocuous moment illuminated our pathways and set a precedent that would define our future.
The whole team was in the office (all four of us), going through the usual routine of cracking on with our respective work, whilst loosely discussing the new brand and the products that we’d created. “The first prototype” seemed to be the moniker most frequently attached to, well, the first prototype. Genius. But also, entirely uninspiring. A week had passed since the samples had arrived from the factory, and our early enthusiasm was waning.
The problem with working as a creative, in any field, is that you need to be in the right headspace to get anything done. When we’d dubbed the brand “3 Legged Thing” there was a buzz about the office for a few days, as we adopted the brand and begun fashioning a culture from within. As the days wore on, and the leg-work for all of the administrative boxes that we needed to tick started to pile up, the conversations dried up, and our excitement dampened.
Later that week, whilst having a conversation about the first prototype, with Queen’s ‘I Want To Break Free’ wafting from the office stereo, one of my staff tripped over her words and exclaimed “For f**k’s sake. I’m calling it Brian.”
It was a watershed moment for 3 Legged Thing. A decision that defined our future naming policy to this very day. Initially, I wasn’t convinced, but after a week of calling it (him) “Brian”, the name had become as much a part of our cultural furniture as the colourful language that reverberated around the shed on a daily basis.
The more I thought about it, the more it actually made sense. One of the things I had noticed during my research, was that every tripod product on the market was given an alpha-numerical name that made no sense to consumers, and often caused problems at the counter.
“Have you the GX451-T19VApro?”
“Yes, mate. Got six out the back.”
As if.
Brian was a name to remember. There was only one tripod called Brian. If a store bought a tripod called Brian, and a customer asked at the counter for the “Brian tripod”, I was absolutely certain that there would be no confusion at all.
When we first started talking to stores and distributors about our products, we were consistently told that the naming convention was brilliant, and easy, and something the staff would smile about when asked to recommend a product. It became a building block for our brand, and it wasn’t long before we’d dubbed our first batch of products “The Rock Legends Range”.
We launched Brian, Eddie, Kirk and Adrian in January 2011, with an option of five colours for the heads, including such wonderous pantones as Asteroid Black, Cosmic Green, Solar Flare (red), Stagsden Blue and my personal favourite, Moon Dust (titanium).
Brian was named for the famed guitarist from Queen, as that terrible solo from I Want To Break Free poisoned our ears when Brian first got his name. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Queen fan, and in later years I actually photographed Brian May with our Keith tripod at the Kerrang! Awards. But that guitar solo can do one. It makes me want to cut my ears off with a spatula.
Eddie came next, after the ear-shattering talent of Eddie Van Halen. Kirk Hammett from Metallica lent his name too, and the tripod range was beautifully rounded off by Adrian (Smith) of the original gods of rock - Iron Maiden.
With each new range came a new theme around it. More were added to the Rock Legends in 2012 with Tony (Iommi), Frank (Zappa), Eric (Clapton) and our monopods Bob (Dylan), Sid (Vicious) and Pete (Doherty).
We ditched the original names in 2015 and brought out the Equinox range featuring the pioneers of our past – Winston (Churchill), Leo (Da Vinci) and Albert (Einstein). Then came Punks, which very quickly became our biggest ever selling tripod range. The first Punks were named by our customers – we ran a competition on social media, and the consensus was huge – Viv and Rik from the brilliant 80s television show, The Young Ones. It was a poignant decision, as Rik Mayall had died only weeks before the poll, and we tipped our hat to his incredible comedic talents with a “The People’s Poet” tag sewn into the Punks bags.
Our second incarnation of Punks took a more musical direction. Each tripod was name after another legend, including Corey (Taylor – Slipknot), Travis (Barker - Blink 182), followed a few months later by Billy (Idol) and then the re-emergence of our hero product, Brian (He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty tripod).
Later came Patti (Smith) as an addition to the Punks, and soon after our brand-new Legends range launched, featuring skateboarding icons from my formative years, including Ray (Barbee), Bucky (Lasek), Mike (McGill), Jay (Adams), Nicky (Guerrero) and Tommy (Guerrero – no relation to Nicky).
Mike & Jay From The Legends Range
Nicky & Tommy From The Legends Range
There’s more to tell you about, but you get the gist. Naming is what we do, and twelve years on from our initial launch we are now seeing many of our competitors giving their products names.
So, thank you Brian, for that crap solo. We owe it all to you.
