This Name Got Us Here. It Can't Take Us Further.

Tonight's Pairing
🥂 Avinyó Petillant Blanc
🫒 Warm sourdough & Castelvetrano olives
On the table: The next chapter

Back in April, our legal team called with news I genuinely didn’t think was possible.

We'd been deep in the legal work of building out our franchise model, the kind of paperwork that makes your eyes cross and simultaneously forces you to slow down.

That process uncovered the one thing we actually weren’t even thinking about about…

Our name.

Turns out another studio, in a far away state, already holds the federal trademark on a name close enough to ours that it matters.

We sat with that fact for a long time before we said a word to anyone outside of our team. Mostly in denial. I also, personally, had a tinge of embarrassment. I mean how do you call yourself a business owner and overlook the very thing you started the whole process with?

We kept turning it over, looking for the version of this story that wasn’t as bad as it sounded, where there was some workaround or silver bullet nobody had thought of yet. We talked to three different trademark attorneys, all with the same outcome, “getting this through would be a miracle, it’s best to just come up with something new.”

I’ve built this business long enough that by now I know most problems have a secret door. A loop hole. A cheat code. And if I’m so honest? I haven’t been able to find this one.

That fact alone unsettles me more than I’d care to admit.

So here’s where I actually want to chat. Not about the trademark language or the legal back and forth, but about the name itself. Because to understand why this hit as hard as it did, you have to understand what the name became, not what we necessarily started with.

Rêve means dream in French.

Say it out loud right now and it probably still doesn’t come out right on the first try. Go on, try it. Oh and also work on finding that pesky little e on your keyboard.

Yeah… that’s been true since day one. While I studied French for nearly a decade and Molly had spent years working in France, we knew exactly how to pronounce Rêve. We knew where the accent went and how to actually type it on our laptops… We didn’t really take anything into account other than that we liked how it felt. But to the general public, it’s been a bit of a journey on the pronunciation side.

We didn’t pick Rêve because of some deep meaning we uncovered, or a story we could point to. Actually, people have asked me before, “Why Rêve?” to which I’ve literally just told them.. it sounded cool and means dream. And while this venture truly does feel like a dream, we picked it because we liked how it looked. We liked how it sounded. And we were ready to get started… That’s literally it.

After looking through the USPTO and giving it what felt like a pretty thorough search, it seemed clean. We went with it.

For years, our name has been a fine trade to make. Half the clients who come through our doors for the first time can’t spell Rêve or pronounce it. We’ve always laughed about it, taught them the how and not really thought twice. It’s become its own kind of inside joke. Any legal call has always ranged from Reeve to Rêve to Revé. Over the years, we’ve honestly stopped correcting people. You’ll get the accent mark wrong. You’ll get the pronunciation wrong.

Everyone does.

Looking back now, that was probably the first sign we have never been quite as tied to the name as we are to everything we have built around it.

That realization helped. What came next didn’t.

The studio that holds the trademark has no plans to expand beyond where they already are. None. They don’t offer what we do. And it doesn't touch our world in any practical sense.

But it doesn’t matter.

So we actually sat down with the owner of that other studio and pointedly asked what it would take to co-exist. Over a few calls and emails, any sliver of hope faded as she politely declined. A right she 100% has and a decision, honestly, I respect and would likely hold on to as well.

That’s when the spiraling began.

What if we just didn’t franchise?

What if we built in our own lane, not trademarked, with a few locations?

What if we tried to skew our name just enough that it got through?

How about we keep Rêve and add a different word around it?

But the ultimate decision still stood. Change our name now or endure roadblocks later. Whether that was issues from the other owner, in which she has every right, issues with future sale of the company, or issues with future franchisees… none of which were worth the cost to simply make the change now.

Nobody cries in this story. What actually happened was much quieter than that. I pushed back and I held onto hope for way longer than I probably should have, turning the problem over and over looking for an angle that made it go away. Some part of me kept waiting for someone to tell us it wasn’t as final as it felt.

Molly and I spent weeks trying to out-think the problem. We would sit on calls, almost laughing at the reality of the situation. This can’t actually be happening. Over and over we thought of new angles and ideas to run past our legal team.

Finally, over a heavy pour of wine, I started trying on other names. Transparently, Molly had been texting me name ideas for weeks, but I couldn’t even bring myself to open the notes.

Every new option felt like a stranger walking into a room full of inside jokes.

That’s when I realized, though, I hadn’t fallen in love with a word. I’d fallen in love with what that word had become thanks to what our community had built it into.

One night, literally last week, I thought… maybe this could be an opportunity. What if this wasn’t only a loss? What if it was the opportunity to finally name the thing we’d actually built?

I don’t think any of us founders know what we’re building when we pick a name. Maybe there’s something in this. Something that could actually hold all of this… our studios and everything that happens inside them.

Losing a name has forced me to sit with something I hadn’t actually thought much about since we started building Rêve.

If the only thing connecting us was a name, then we never really built much of anything at all.

That’s a hard sentence to write, harder to sit with. But it’s true, and it’s actually the good news buried in all of this.

Because when I really think about what people mean when they talk about “the Rêve effect,” they’re not talking about the name. They’re talking about walking into a room and feeling like someone’s expecting them. They’re talking about the 50 minutes where their body gets tired and their mind gets clear at the same time. They’re talking about the instructor who remembers what happened between today and the last class they took of theirs, the person next to them on the reformer who’s become a real friend, the feeling of leaving ready to take on the rest of the day.

None of that lives in four letters and an accent mark.

It never did.

It lives in the studio, in the clients, in the workout itself. That part isn’t going anywhere, no matter what we end up calling ourselves.

Advice I would give myself in 2023 when we were just starting out?

I’d ask myself, “how would I plan this if I knew it was going to be a huge success?” and I’d actually DO those things.

I know how that sounds sitting on the other side. But when you’re building something where every penny counts and you’re not even sure it’s going to work… it feels like a formality, something you’ll circle back to once things are “real.”

We believed in what Rêve would become. But then those things actually happened, and growth found us, and that’s exactly the moment this caught up with us.

This was never really about ambition. It’s about protection. It’s the same reason you’d lock your front door even in your cozy neighborhood where nothing’s ever happened.

And here’s my honest confession, laying it all out there. We knew this. We knew it early on, and we didn’t do it anyway, because we didn’t want to spend the small amount of money we did have to start on something that felt hypothetical at the time.

So I’ll leave you with this. I’m not a trademark attorney. I’m a business owner who liked a word a few years ago and is now living with what happens when the legal world doesn’t care.

And we actually don’t have this figured out yet.

So if you’ve been through a rebrand, or a trademark situation, or you’re sitting on a name idea you think we should hear, or honestly if you just have advice for how to survive the logistics of a weight like this, I want it.

Drop it in the comments or join the chat.

The name got us here. That is true, and it matters. But it can’t take us further, and I’d rather build whatever comes next with our community involved than hand them a finished decision one day out of nowhere.

This one, we’re building together.