Women give up their names regularly, in fact, society expects that she will when she gets married. And if I’m being completely honest, I probably would have too, if I had gotten married in my early 20s. But having established a business and name for myself before tying the knot at 29, I decided it was only right that I always be Megan Pinckney— even if I added another name after it.
But what happens when a women doesn’t just give up her name, but sells it because it’s tied to a business she founded and created?!
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately since returning from my trip to Aurora, New York. I was there with Mackenzie-Childs, as it’s the home of their workshop and farm.
I’ve been one of their ambassadors for a few years now, but I’ve been a fan for even longer! My junior year in college, I roomed with two girls from Rochester, New York. They both brought pieces to our apartment from their mothers’ Mackenzie-Childs’ collections and I remember asking them “what is that?!” Those Courtly Checks were hard to ignore, but something about them were soooo chic to me!!! Ir remember them telling me “everyone back in Upstate NY had Mackenzie-Childs in their home” and it was one of those things that once I saw them…. I’d constantly see them out in the wild. It was then that I determined, I would know I had made it once I had a Mackenzie-Childs tea kettle sitting on my stove (and now I do, sitting on the stove in both our Charleston + Columbia homes).
But I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to “sell your name” ever since social media as been inundated with the story of Victoria Mackenzie-Childs. She’s the creative and founder behind the brand I love. But if I’ve learned anything since being a “creator” and my ties to art museums in South Carolina, it’s that being a creative/artist and being a business person are two completely different things.
Victoria and Richard MacKenzie-Childs founded their company in 1983 in Aurora, New York. The whimsy the brand is known for all came from them. It was their personality and their craft. But by 2000, the business was in drier financial trouble. Bankruptcy was looming, but rather than watch everything they’d built disappear— and take an entire small town’s economy with it— the company was sold.
That sale, and the ones that followed, is what kept those jobs, that workshop, and those Courtly Check tea kettles alive. Victoria and Richard chose not to stay on after the transition, and that was their right, but the name stayed. And names have a way of keeping people attached…even when the person behind the name has moved on.
Thinking about names, legacies, and what happens when the world falls in love with something you no longer own.
A short documentary recently brought Victoria back into the public eye. She and Richard have lived for the past 25 years on the Yankee Ferry, the last surviving Ellis Island ferryboat, docked in Staten Island. It’s an unusual, artist-brained life… one Victoria herself described as extraordinary. But the internet saw an elderly woman on a boat and drew its own conclusions. The outrage was immediate: How could they?
Except... who is “they”?
This is what I keep coming back to. The grief people felt watching that documentary wasn’t really about the current owners of MacKenzie-Childs. It was about the name. Because when a woman’s name is on the door, we never stop associating the two. Kate Spade hasn’t been part of her namesake brand since 2007… she sold it years before her death. But when she died, people mourned as if the brand had lost the head of the company that day. Because to them, it had never stopped being hers.
There’s something worth sitting with there— especially for those of us building brands.
I named my company PINCK. It isn’t my legal name, but anyone who knows me knows it came from Pinckney. It came from my family. It came from me. And if I’m honest, the thought of it belonging to someone else one day with someone making decisions I can’t control, or someone shaping what it stands for, makes me feel something I don’t have a clean word for yet.
But here’s the tension: businesses exist to grow. And sometimes the biggest growth comes from letting go. Selling isn’t failure. Selling isn’t betrayal. For Victoria, selling may have been the only reason her life’s work survived at all.
What I do think, though (and what I think every woman building something should at least consider) is what it will mean to have your name outlive your ownership of it. Because it might. And the world will still call it yours.
So before you name your business after yourself ask the question Victoria probably never thought to ask in 1983: What happens to my name if this outlives me?
Not in a fearful way. In an intentional one!
Because the women who came before us gave up their names without a second thought: to husbands, to households, to histories that were never really written with them in mind. We have the chance to be different; to be deliberate. To decide, eyes open, what we attach our identity to and what we’re willing — or not willing — to let go of one day.
Victoria MacKenzie-Childs built something so beautiful, so specific, so her that 25 years after she walked away from it, strangers on the internet were grieving on her behalf. That’s not a cautionary tale. That’s a legacy. The caution is just this: know what you’re building when you put your name on the door. Because once the world falls in love with it, it stops being only yours.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s always been the point!
You can read more about my trip to Aurora, NY and the whimsical farm and workshop that Mackenzie-Childs calls home on www.shadesofpinck.com later this week!
My trip was in partnership with MacKenzie-Childs, but as always, all opinions are entirely my own.
For Paid Subscribers: A Framework for Women Building Branded Businesses Behind their Names
Consider this a gentle warning that nobody ever gave me.
PINCK didn’t start as a business, or a brand. It started a blog and was named after I felt like I’d outgrown the one I initially started with. I wasn’t thinking about equity or exits or what would happen if it ever became something bigger than a corner of the internet I wrote from. I was just naming a thing I loved.
And then the thing I loved became a business! And suddenly the name wasn’t just mine anymore… it became a reputation and then an asset with real value attached to it. And now every decision I make about it felt personal in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Because it’s my name… it is personal.
So if you’re naming a business, or if you already have and you’re just now realizing what that means, here are the questions I think every woman should sit with before she signs her name to something.
