How Ambire Collective got its name

Two weeks. We were two weeks away from launching Hive 2.0. when we had to pump the brakes.

The app was built, and the website was almost finished, and we'd spent months planning, building, and promising our members that something big was coming. We were so, so close.

But then, our lawyer called and told us we couldn't trademark our name "Hive Ambition."

We'd love to say that we immediately pivoted with grace and strategic precision, but that wouldn't be totally accurate. The news was painful and unexpected, so we took a moment to grieve and recalibrate. We didn't immediately agree on the path forward, but after a lot of honest conversation (and a lot of very long voice memos), we decided to rebrand now rather than later.

And once we felt aligned and ready, we did the only logical thing you can do in a moment like this: Book a weekend branding retreat in an Airbnb to come up with a new name, of course!

The branding retreat

The idea for the retreat was that we'd give ourselves a whole weekend locked in a cabin together to build the brand and come up with a name.

So Rachel built a branding sprint for the two of us to work through together. It included naming exercises and the foundational stuff that would make naming possible. For example, we compared core values we'd each ranked independently, wrote our mission and vision statements together for the first time, and did a 79-card brand personality exercise.

We pulled tarot and oracle cards and brought books, Scrabble tiles, and huge Post-Its to write down any inspiring words we stumbled upon. We did word association chains, convergence games where we tried to land on the same word at the same time, and a mood board speed round where we scrolled our Pinterest boards in silence and wrote down every word that came to mind.

By the end of the first day, we had pages and pages of raw material. There were words everywhere, scrawled across massive post-its with a master list that was hundreds of words long.

What we found (before the name)

We went into the retreat thinking it was about naming, and it definitely was, but what actually happened was that we laid the foundation for our partnership and the vision for this community's future.

Up until that weekend, we'd been running fast. Building the app, planning events like the Better Together event, coordinating the relaunch, managing the community, and dealing with the trademark fallout. We hadn't really stopped to sit across from each other and say,

"Okay. What are we actually building? Where is this going? What do we believe?"

The retreat forced us to pause and do that, and the answers came easier than we thought they would.

Our core values landed almost immediately. We'd each come up with our own core values, ranked them independently before the retreat, and when we compared, the overlap was almost eerie.

Our mission and vision came together in a single sitting, and our brand personality alignment was so close that the few places we had different views became some of the most useful conversations of the whole weekend.

By Saturday night, we'd done all the deep work. We had our values, our mission, our vision, our brand personality, our ICP language, and a massive list of words.

We'd run combinations, checked trademarks, and tested phrases.

But…we still didn't have a name. Nothing had given us that tingly-oh-my-gosh-we-found-it feeling yet.

The last night

We were honest-to-god discouraged. We'd gone in with the goal of walking out with a name, and it was the last night, we were out of steam, and we didn't have one.

We'd started cleaning up, winding down, and kind of accepting that maybe the name would come later and we'd just need to sit with everything we'd uncovered and let it breathe.

Rachel picked up an oracle card deck, one she hadn't used before, and started absentmindedly shuffling it. She didn't intend to pull a card (Frankly, we weren't in the mood). It was just a tactile fidget to start winding down for the night, and while she was shuffling, a card popped out and fell onto the table.  

It was the Ambition card.

It stopped both of us because we'd spent two days asking ourselves what connects every single woman in this community, and the answer kept circling back to the same thing. It wasn't industry, or geography, or stage of business. It was ambition. This unbridled willingness to reach toward often lofty dreams with courage and curiosity, even when safety and sure bets would have been so much more comfortable.

So we opened the guidebook to read the card's meaning, and in the description was the word Ambire, a Latin word for ambition.

We both knew the second we read it.

The card's explanation also included symbols: a wren and a bunch of nature-inspired imagery. Which was its own kind of confirmation, because we'd both been gravitating toward nature themes all weekend.

Throughout our Pinterest boards, our word associations, and the textures and images that kept pulling us in, nature had been a thread through everything.

We landed on Collective because that's what this is. It was never supposed to be about two founders. It was always supposed to be about a community of women building alongside each other, and the ripple effect that kind of proximity creates.

We said it out loud a few times, and just kept saying.

"Is this it?"

"Did we find it?"

"I can't believe we found it."

We were smiley and giddy, and suddenly wide awake again.

After we left the retreat, we did some preliminary searching, spoke with our lawyer, and gave ourselves a little time to let it settle. When everything kept coming back as "yes," we knew we'd truly found it.

Bringing it to life

We worked with our designer to turn what we'd uncovered into a visual identity, and the retreat gave us so much to work with.

The logo was intentional down to every detail.

The hexagon is a forever nod to our Hive roots, and inside it sits a wren, that same tiny bird from the oracle card. Wrens are known for their determination, adaptability, and refusal to be underestimated. It's also literally a symbol of ambition, which still feels almost too perfect.

The color palette came from the retreat, too. During one of our mood board exercises, we had both independently pinned the same graphic, an emerald and tangerine image that neither of us had discussed. When we realized we'd both been drawn to the same colors, it became the foundation for the entire color story.

The future of Ambire Collective

Ashley built the first chapter of this community. She created it, nurtured it, and brought it to life. Rachel came in and fell in love with what it already was.

But we built Ambire together. The mission, the vision, the values, the strategy, the brand, and where we're headed, every single piece of it was created in partnership, and that feels really meaningful for two women who believe wholeheartedly in the power of collaboration and community.  

We have plans that extend well beyond Asheville and beyond a membership community. We hope to build an entire ecosystem for the ambitious female entrepreneur, where she can get community, capital, visibility, and mentorship in one place.

The road ahead is long, but we're overflowing with excitement to get to walk it, and we now have a brand, one we own legally, creatively, and emotionally, that can grow with us.

We didn't plan for any of this. We would've happily kept the name we had. But sometimes the thing that disrupts your entire plan is the thing that was supposed to happen all along.