‘How it was named’ is a series where I explore the creation of brand names that have caught my interest. This edition features Ankita Sinha of Bona Shona

 

1] Tell us about Bona Shona; what do you do?

 

Bona Shona is a purveyor of hand-loomed textile products, currently offering only sarees but with intent to expand to other products… salwars, saree blouses, household linens, kids’ clothing etc. It’s ‘tradition in every thread’ as the tagline states. The name literally translates to ‘woven gold’.

 

2] And why do you do it?

 

I source the sarees I sell directly from the weavers, at very competitive prices, without any middlemen involved. I want the weavers to be paid fairly for their labour, for their art to find a bigger market, and to spread the joy of wearing handloomed sarees to people who value them as they deserve.

 

I suppose I always knew I’d start this business… something that’s always fascinated me is just wearing a saree (even if I’ve always been terrible at it), watching my mother do it and admiring her collection of sarees has been so inspiring.

 

My ‘expertise’ would be the fact that I am a Bengali raised in the South of India, both regions with a rich heritage of textile weaving traditions. I’ve seen a wide range of textiles because of this: your average Calcutta Bengalis wearing cotton sarees like Taant on a day-to-day basis, or the minute you go to a pooja you wear a Jamdani, or you go to a shaadi (wedding) and you wear a Banarasi or a Baluchari. Then you move down to South India and it’s Kanjeevarams, Mysore Silks and such all the way. You do have a lot of options in between, of course… and this is just what I *currently* know! Every single state in India has its own plethora of weaving and textile traditions that deserve to be preserved, cherished, elevated and celebrated.

 

3] What values inform your ‘why’?

 

Access is an important aspect of my business. I was a saree consumer before I started this business. About two years ago, I wanted a saree for Durga Pujo and eventually bought one from Myntra (one of India’s premier online marketplaces for fashion, makeup, homewares, tech etc) paying about ₹3,500–4,000, for a cotton saree. My mother found the same saree in Goriahat, West Bengal, for a fraction of that! If you live in Kolkata (or anywhere else in Bengal), you have a shop in every corner, you can just go out there and buy a saree in, like, half an hour or even less. I want people elsewhere in India, particularly those in tier 2, tier 3 cities and beyond to have similar access to these sarees and for it not to be an aspirational thing for them.

 

Access aside, I personally feel that a saree like this should be affordable. A cotton saree, especially, is not meant just for the fashionable, the elite or people with a six-figure-paying job going to an office and stuff. It’s an everyday staple for millions of Indians and as such, I think it should remain normalised, accessible and affordable. I’ve done my research and I can tell you that the same weavers who sell to me also cater to a few other brands (we do each have customisations and owned designs etc). Where it really varies though is the price point and the difference in cost to the end consumer. Many brands have a profit margin of 300-400%, and not because there’s any real difference in the quality of the product.

 

And yet, very little of that money is going to the weavers. I’ve seen first-hand how much work goes into making a single saree because I grew up around these weavers, seeing them every summer when I visited my granny’s place. The weavers making these sarees have been doing this for generations, it’s an unparalleled level of experience and expertise. But they’ve never gotten their worth because when they put it out into the market, a saree that could probably take them seven days to make, they sell it for just 300–400 rupees. Their labour is being priced at pennies! They’re charging merely what they spend on materials and it’s just so unfair that their work isn’t valued as it ought to be.

 

4] How did you end up with the name Bona Shona? (did you work with an agency, undertake trademark searches and registration, indicative costs…)

 

So I was a complete novice and I had absolutely no idea of how naming, branding, trademarking and all of that worked. When you’re starting a business from scratch without ever having done it before, you have this idea in your head, a whole vision “this is what I’m going to call it, this is the name I want and of course I’m going to get it.” Bona Shona wasn’t my first choice. It was not even my second or my third or my fourth.

 

I brainstormed some names that didn’t work out, then turned to AI just to see what it had to offer. And the ones it offered were so cliched! Obviously, its output was built from other brands, websites and places which already existed… maybe they were changing a letter here and there to differentiate but it just didn’t work for me. I realised that’s not the route I want to go, I wanted it to be a little more personal.

 

A couple of things I had in mind about the name is, one, it needs to have a good recall value. If I can’t even remember how it’s spelled or pronounced, I won’t, can’t, go back and type it out in a search. There are a lot of amazing brands that I come across on Instagram, which have really complicated names, right? You might go to their website, put stuff in your cart and then exit… but try and find them again and you simply can’t remember who/what they are. I didn’t want that for my brand.

 

At the same time, I didn’t want to box myself in by having ‘sarees’ or clothing in the name because I wanted to branch out eventually. And I wanted a little bit of a Bengali touch because I’m Bengali…

 

I’d often use ‘Shona’ when addressing my daughter and it struck me that ‘Shona’ is something that everyone knows (it’s a very common nickname/ term of endearment across India… Shona, Shonu, Shontu, that sort of thing) so I started there. I was playing around with it, seeing what other words went with it or rhymed with it and ‘Bona’ came up… it just struck me, I wrote it down, and thought to myself “oh, there you have it.”

 

I told about four or five friends of mine who are not Bengalis to gauge how it landed with them and they said it’s something they’d definitely remember, as did my non-Bengali husband. Like, it’s a very easy name to remember. It just rolls off your tongue, it’s not a tongue twister. It just seemed like a good fit, because it’s also not… it doesn’t give you the impression that this is a saree business only. ‘Woven gold’ (which is what the name means) can be anything woven, right? Since I was focusing on the art and craft of hand-loomed everything, the name was absolutely perfect. I did some knock-out searches, the name was available so I went ahead and filed for trademark registration for the name and the logo. I learned my lesson!

 

5] What did you almost call it before deciding on ‘Bona Shona’?

 

So the first option that I wanted and I very naively thought I’m going to get is my nickname in Bengali — my family calls me ‘Paakhi’, I thought I would name it that. I even went ahead and bought the domain name without verifying whether it was already taken as a brand name. And then I realised, that’s not how it works — the name was taken. The second name I came up with was ‘Bulbul’, it’s what I call my daughter. Same result.

 

There were more after that… but, I still remember this, it was 2.30 in the night, I’m just sitting there and I’m so frustrated! I’ve opened the trademark filings page and every name I’m typing into it, it just says taken, taken, taken. There are a bunch of others, not yet taken but there are five other people contesting it. It was a mess. I was so frustrated, I remember thinking “Forget about running a business, I can’t even come up with a name!”

 

Even before I started my own business, I had my father’s example to learn from. He started a restaurant chain back in the day, we have about four locations, called Babu Moshai. We were the first ones in Bangalore with the name Babu Moshai for a restaurant. It did so well that within five or six years you had like eight other copycat Babu Moshais pop-up elsewhere all over Bangalore. It still doesn’t have a logo after being in this business for so long! My father obviously wasn’t in the know and could have really benefited from working with an expert to sort out his branding, filing a trademark registration etc.

 

6] How important is a business name according to you?

 

Very important, because you don’t want to box yourself in and give people the impression that [x] is all that you do, or accidentally leave out a large chunk of your offering.

 

Or, be easily copyable — I’ve observed that when you do have one brand that really takes off, you have a lot of copycats coming in and using that name.

 

Like the word ‘loom’, for example (absolutely no shade to any brand using the word)… you have so many, SO MANY brands out there dealing in textile products using the word ‘loom’ in their brand. It creates such confusion… there’s one that I buy my saree blouses from and every time I search for it I end up on a different brand’s website because of how Google search now works with paid ads at the top before your actual search results appear.

 

So I think your brand name is very, very important in that aspect, because there are times when people won’t even be able to find you — they might just confuse you for someone else, or confuse your competitor for you, and then before you know it, you’ve lost that customer base… it’s gone.

 

Also, it’s good to… I think it always makes sense to have in your brand name that aspect which gives your buyers an idea of what they’re coming to you for… a descriptor, effectively. But then again, you have brands like Apple, which don’t follow that convention and yet have been wildly successful.

 

7] What one thing do you wish people were aware of about your area of expertise/industry? 

 

It’s an extremely saturated market, no doubt, but it is still a HUGE market. Saree-wearing isn’t a dying form, as some might have you believe. Sarees may not be an everyday staple in urban areas as they once were but that’s a relatively tiny portion of the population. Even when people inherit sarees from their mothers or grandmothers, the fact that they value wearing them means they’re willing to invest in building and expanding their own collection, so there will always be a market for them. You cannot separate Indians from their sarees. And there’s a space for every saree vendor in that market.

 

The other thing I wish people would pay attention to is the disparity between how much you’re paying for the product and how much of that the weavers are getting. I think people should be aware of that when they’re going to buy and make more informed choices.

 

8] Question for funsies! Fill in the blank: Whatever you do, don’t _____ 

 

Whatever you do, don’t haggle with small businesses just because you can.

 

You wouldn’t do that in a mall, right? Or go to, say, Tanishq, or Nalli etc and haggle with them. By all means, do your research — check out multiple websites and vendors, compare and make an informed decision. But people are a little too comfortable haggling with smaller businesses and vendors; all they’re doing is devaluing the work that goes into creating the product and the person who loses the most is the maker.