Who We Are
What does it mean?
OR…
How do you say it.?
Let me start with how you say it.
It is a Spanish word. So the A says ah. Like “Tra la la la la!”
It is not TRAY-ZO! It’s TRAH-SO!!
But do not be embarrassed when you say it wrong, because it gives me an opportunity to tell you about the word and why we picked it!
When we sat down with the very lovely Candace Joseph to rebrand and build-up what became Trazo Design, the name was the most important. The flagstone of all the remaining conversations.
I wanted it to stand alone.
I won’t give away all her secrets but her patience with us was astounding and the final product was EXACTLY as I dreamed.
We wrote down any and every option we could think of for a name.
Our family of 7 (including 5 kiddos) had just returned from a life in the Central American country, Panama. So we came up with our names + words and then translated them to Spanish because that season of our life was important for me to incorporate into this season of our life.
I still have all my sticky notes with every possible company name and I treasure them. Some of them you will see mixed into the content of our website and woven into our vocabulary that makes up our mission, value, and vision for Trazo.
My Argentinian friend, Ellie V, was helping me brainstorm over Whats App and she came up with a few and TRAZO happened to be one of them. I loved what the word means and Z is such a fun letter, symmetrical yet unique!
Trazo means “stroke” in Spanish...not like heart attack kind of stroke, although sometimes I feel like that is the very word it means in my life! It means stroke like a “paint brush stroke” or a “pen stroke.”
I loved the idea of paintbrush strokes because the spaces we all use are similar yet each of us is different...therefore how we use those spaces and how we like those spaces is different. Just as each paintbrush stroke is different …. similar yet uniquely different.
The idea of design is highly valuable to me because order is an integral part of design, and design an integral part of order. They go hand in hand, one without the other is imbalanced.
I am going to go out on a limb here. I am no theologian, but I am a respecter of beauty and order and there is no greater example of this than the very beginning, Creation.
It’s called the Genesis Principal. There is a book, The Genesis Principal, by Patti Chirico. I read long ago when I began my career in the organizing industry. As you can imagine, it has to do with the balance of creation, “the ancient blueprints of order.” God is the architect of both beauty and order. It is the very foundation of how He “separated, combined, evaluated and assigned” all that we see and know. Before He accomplished all of this, “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface…” Genesis 1:2 He added all the beauty and the order and their functions.
Even if you don’t believe in the God of this universe you can look around and see how this idea of order beauty. Night and Day, Land and Sea, Birds and Beasts, Man and Woman, in all of this there is unfathomable beauty and purpose in each of those categories.
Done preaching. I won’t use this platform to do that (often!) but this very principle is where I wanted to continue the marriage of “Beauty + Function” into my business model, my industry and the very name of my company.
Organizers can get a reputation of setting up systems that work great they just don’t look great and Decorators have the same reputation in reverse...it looks great but doesn’t always work great! Thus birthed Trazo, Organized Design. I wanted to create spaces that are balanced and polished.
I have been known to say the phrase, “good looking” ALOT and “that works great” ALOT. Beauty and order matter a great deal to me.. When one of those 2 things is missing from the spaces where I go to accomplish a task, the task is not (as) enjoyable because it lacks beauty or eats up too much time and energy because it lacks order.
So Trazo Design, LLC became the new name! Names are super important to me! My kids all have fascinating names and my name even has a good story...but today is about Trazo!