Parents come up with ideas to give their child an unusual name in different ways. For example, the daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin of Coldplay is named Apple, but not in honor of Steve Jobs, but because the musician’s agent already had a daughter with the same name, and the future parents liked how it sounded.

Basketball legend Kobe Bryant was named after the famous Kobe beef which his parents once saw on a restaurant menu. But the hero of today’s story got his name in honor of his parents’ bakery. About this bakery, and also about naming in particular, our tale will actually be.

The author of the post was named after his parents’ small bakery and started working there since his youth

Image credits: Tran (not the actual image)

At the age of 18, the guy lost both his parents so he ran the business on his own for a decade, as per the time described

Image credits: u/Ok_Possibility_8497

Image credits: Tim Douglas (not the actual image)

Image credits: u/Ok_Possibility_8497

After the author got married, he invited his wife’s mom and sister to work at the bakery, too

Image credits: Adrien Olichon (not the actual image)

Image credits: u/Ok_Possibility_8497

However, the in-laws started insisting he rename the bakery soon after, reflecting the fact it’s ‘a family business’

So, the Original Poster’s (OP) parents opened a joint bakery and named it using the word ‘Sun’. The author’s mom was the main inspirer of the family business, so when four years later she found out about her pregnancy, she decided to name her son Sunny, after her bakery. When the boy was seven, his mother passed away and he and his father ran the business together. And when our hero was eighteen, he became the sole owner of the bakery, and successfully managed it for the next decade.

A few years ago, the OP married a wonderful woman, ‘Lila’, and they started working at the bakery together. Over time, Lila invited her mother and sister to work there, and the bakery again became, in fact, a joint family business. However, the women didn’t seem to like the name of the bakery, and over and over again hinted to Sunny that they should rebrand it, so that the new bakery name would reflect the fact that it’s a family business.

Neither Sunny nor his wife were thrilled by such demands from their relatives, but they were getting more and more insistent every day, until they finally cornered him at a family gathering, literally demanding that he rename the bakery. The original poster flatly refused, and it all ended in a family drama, during which the in-laws told the author “he was being deliberately obtuse.” However, for Sunny, it was a matter of principle, as well as a matter of honoring the memory of his late parents.

Image credits: Igor Ovsyannykov (not the actual image)

“Predicting the results of a rebranding or name change is always difficult, but there’s a silent rule in marketing – don’t touch what works well,” says Alexei Filanovskiy, a marketing expert from Kyiv, Ukraine, with whom Bored Panda got in touch for a comment on this story. “You can think about changing the name only when it does not correspond to reality and hinders business development. This is clearly not the case.”

“Customers have become accustomed to the name over the many years of the bakery’s existence – especially since something “sunny” in the brand name evokes positive emotions, firstly, and secondly, the combination of the brand and the owner’s name is a great story per se. In general, rebranding is not the best idea in this situation,” Alexei states.

Rob Meyerson, a US-based brand consultant and namer, agrees with this point of view, as in his column for Enterpreneur he lists six main reasons for rebranding: legal challenges, offensiveness, merger or acquisition, infamicide, bullies or growth. As you can see, the situation we described does not fit any of the above reasons, so the original poster should remain adamant in his unwillingness to change the name of the successful business.

Most commenters were generally not as sensitive as our experts, immediately asking the original poster a question, ‘do his in-laws have any financial stake in the company other than just being paid workers?’ When the author replied that his relatives are just employees, people commented that he perhaps has much bigger problems than the name of his bakery as the in-laws think they own it now. So the OP would have to be very careful in this case so as not to lose his business, which has been his for decades. So, by the way, what do you think the author should do?

Marketing experts think that rebranding isn’t a wise idea here, while commenters just suspect the in-laws want to take away the author’s business

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