There’s a moment — quiet, uncomfortable — when every startup with a few miles on it, and less to show than they thought they’d have by a certain highway marker, looks in the mirror and asks the same question: Do we start over?
It’s a seductive idea — the fantasy of a fresh start. We’ve heard it time and time again with Archibald, from customers, friends, colleagues, and even echoing in our own heads: start fresh under a new name… leave the past behind.
The Cappi situation pulled us into a downward spiral for years, a hole we barely crawled out of. And when we were finally out of the hole, all we were doing was treading water. The negative reviews, loss of customer confidence, and lack of new customers — the bad energy kept us pinned to the same spot. We’d lost momentum and couldn’t find it again.
Everyone told us the best thing to do was cut our losses and start fresh. No ifs, ands, or buts — the best way forward was under a new name. We could keep everything else in place. Migrate the community and customers over, explain the reason behind the new name in a private email, get rid of the stained sheets and reintroduce ourselves as something fresh and new.
And look — I understand the logic. When a name accumulates damage, the instinct to shed it is almost biological. It’s the lizard-brain solution: cut the tail, grow a new one, and hope nobody notices the scar tissue. But scars aren’t bad. Some see them as badges of honor, signs someone has been through something. They’re reminders of the version that came before the version you’re proud of now.
At the end of the day, we claim authenticity and transparency. So, trying to sweep past incidents under the carpet would immediately make us hypocrites. Besides, we think a name, if it’s going to mean anything at all, has to earn its weight over time. It has to absorb the years, the mistakes, the incremental improvements that nobody applauds but everyone feels. We don’t think you build that by starting over and feigning perfection.
Archibald was a stranger, someone sitting at the Longbar in Shanghai. Rohan, Archibald’s founder, shared a drink with him by pure coincidence on the return from one of his initial trips surveying the landscape for this brand he was trying to start at the time. He had seen the idea with other direct-to-consumer eyewear companies, ecommerce startups with cheap frames, that were booming on the backs of fresh venture funding.
So, when Rohan met Archibald, the idea of building a better DTC eyewear brand with London branding was in the toilet. The product being pushed by the DTC brands was entry-level ‘slop’ marketed as something more to uninitiated millennials in their first jobs… it literally relied on the customers having no appreciation or exposure to a quality product. And it relied on the conclusion that it was impossible to get a “good enough” product made, sold, and delivered for a price point somewhere near the $95 he was aiming for.
That’s when Archi, the stranger at the bar, pointed out that the concept still worked if the value proposition was there. It just couldn’t be done for the price target Rohan had in mind. But Archi confirmed what Rohan had believed when he first set out on this adventure — that a quality product would always attract the right customers. And that those customers would be willing to pay more for a quality product if the price tag warranted it. Reinvigorated, Rohan’s next trip was to Sabae, Japan, where the best frames in the world are made.
Our name, Archibald, is not the problem. Somewhere along the way, society confused the symptom for the disease. A tarnished name is what happens after the fact. It’s the scar left behind, not the wound. For us, the name didn’t fail our customers. We failed our customers. And the difference between those two sentences is the entire argument.
There is something to be said — something almost old-fashioned (and I mean that as a compliment) — about standing in front of the thing you built and saying: yes, this is mine, and yes, we had problems, and yes, we are fixing them, and we aren’t going to play tricks to hide from it because that is what accountability looks like.
That kind of trust — the earned, hard-fought, seen-at-your-worst kind — doesn’t transfer to a new name. You don’t get to take it with you. And sure, the naysayers and trolls will never quite let it go, but when you build something public-facing, this is a risk you’re taking no matter what you do. So you can try to leave it behind with the old Instagram handle and start from zero. And sure, you can feign “newness” and perhaps attract some new customers. Except every so often (as is common), the trolls will find you. And now you also carry the ghost of what you were.
Better to own Archibald and transform it than to abandon it and pretend.
I want to be clear: this was not the easy choice. Every exit ramp was clearly marked. The branding consultants, friends, family, and industry titans we shared a cup of coffee or drinks with were persuasive. The logic was sound, on its face. And given Archibald is fairly unknown, it’s logistically pretty painless. We have very little, near nothing, to lose by changing the name.
But easy and right aren’t always the same road. And a pristine identity is often just that… pristine. Untouched. Unproven. And in our world, untouched things are rarely the most interesting.
Patina is not a marketing strategy. You can’t fake time (fans of Golden Goose will staunchly disagree). You can try and simulate it — distress the leather, wash the fabric, soften the edges — but anyone who knows what they’re looking at can tell the difference between a fake patina and a real one. Brands are no different. It takes work to establish something with heritage, something that has been touched.
Fixing what’s broken under your own name takes work. Showing up, day after day, as a business that acknowledges its history and does something different with it. Answering a backlog of customer service emails that piled up for months on end, and then months again. Finding new partners and craftsmen to establish business relationships with (after parading around forums defending the work of a craftsman who turned out to be duplicitous). Hanging our heads at the end of a day after seeing zero sales, and then waking back up to do it again. Finding inner motivation to move forward without immediate results — that is the work.
Archibald earned its damage honestly. And it will earn its redemption the same way.
This isn’t stubbornness for its own sake. We’re not clinging to the name out of sentimentality or fear of change. Our product evolves. Our family of craftsmen improves. Our partnerships with our tanneries, mills, and material suppliers strengthen. The standards tighten. The point of view sharpens.
If Archibald is going to stand for anything, it has to be built the slow way. Through iteration, correction, and the kind of stubborn consistency that doesn’t photograph well but compounds over time.
So the name stays.
Not because it has to, and not because it can’t be refined, reframed, or reintroduced.
But because it’s ours. The name Archibald carries where we’ve been. It reflects what we’ve learned. And, importantly, it leaves nowhere to hide from where we’re going.
