Co-founding and designing the only specialty trail and mountain running store in the Sea to Sky Corridor.
Having always wanted to create my own product, a trip to Hawaii spawned the idea for a small retail store focusing on outdoor lifestyle goods. After chatting with a few friends, the idea evolved into a trail running store, combining my initial idea with a hole in the market. In 2016, with two partners, I co-founded and opened Capra, the only specialty trail and mountain running store in Squamish, BC.
Naming is arguably the hardest part of branding. The name needs to be recognizable, not too forced or gimmicky, ideally have some meaning, and work well in usernames, URLs, email address, etc. without having to resort to an awkward acronym or removing vowels.
We threw some obvious names around: Sea to Sky Running, Squamish Run Co... I'm quite sure Tantalus, Atwell, and Garibaldi were thrown in as well but there are already multiple businesses using those names, and we wanted to do something more clever. I challenged my partners (and myself) to see if we could think a little deeper.
A couple days later the word Capra came up and it hit all the marks. It was short, unique, and coming from the latin genus for wild mountain goats, it gave more meaning than a random word. The obvious choice would be a goat icon, but I wanted to keep some mystery with the name and not lock us down to “the goat company.” But the name added a cheeky nod and was a great conversation starter (especially if you speak Polish) which is exactly what we were hoping for as a new business.
The single word also allowed us to add “running” afterwards to give more context, but over time as the brand recognition grew, Capra could be used on its own. Much like brand marks/icons eventually gain meaning (Nike, Apple, Arc'teryx, etc.) and become identifiable on their own. New top level domains also allowed us to secure capra.run for the website. Short domain names and email addresses FTW! Anyone who has tried to fit a super long email address on a business card can attest to this.