I’d been thinking for a while about separating the kids and pets side of my photography from my main (wedding focused) business, Kate McElwee Photography, when it suddenly struck me: I wanted to call this business … Little Monsters! As well as the name being cute-as-a-button, the singular version, Little Monster, was my late step-grandad’s name for my mom when I was growing up. I couldn’t very well use his name for me, Little Bleeder, but Little Monster kept it in the family which I though was cool (we called my step-grandad Jimbo, and my grandma Dragon – and all this seemed perfectly normal to me!) Anyway, as soon as I had the name I knew it was time to jump-start the business and I spent a week or so putting together a logo, designing the website, getting launched on Facebook … and that’s when I found out there was a small problem. Another photographer had decided long before me that Little Monsters Photography was a damn cool name. D’oh!
To cut a long story short, although we were serving different geographical areas, and despite the fact that our photography, branding and colors are quite different, I could be getting myself into a legal knot by using the phrase Little Monsters in my business name, even in an abstract way (I’d thought that ‘Shoot My Little Monsters’ might cut it and tried, briefly to set up under that name). And I’m just not that into getting myself twisted up in legal knots.
Back to the drawing board.
On the coldest night so far this winter, I sat down with my husband and started brainstorming. It was important to keep the name fun, and a little bit cheeky. I wanted it to work for doggies as much as for kids (my own ‘kid’ is a doggy), and I wanted it to make people smile. We brainstormed alternatives to monsters, and alternatives to the word little. I came up with beasties … Josh came up with wee. Wee Beasties. Wee Beasties … I said it a few times – it feels good in the mouth! – and decided that maybe that just might work. Wee Beasties. While I was chewing on the new name, Josh was busy doing some google research. He shrieked with delight when he discovered that when Antony Van Leeuwenhoek saw the first animal cells through his new invention, the microscope, he called them his “cavorting wee beasties”. My husband’s PhD is in Molecular and Cellular Biology … so I guess it was meant to be. 
I hope you like it. Here’s Porter, our wee beastie, as a mucky little pup.
