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Today I ate lunch at The Bread Factory, an all-purpose food place here in New York. I use the phrase “food place” because I don’t know exactly what to call it. The [rather unprofessional] website calls them a cafe, as does the logo, but I don’t know if that is the best way to represent their company, or their brand. I wouldn’t call it a deli because the atmosphere and the pricetag go against the down-home associations to that word. Obviously, it’s not a real factory.

If you’ve never been there, you’d probably think The Bread Factory is some sort of bakery offering a wide variety of exotic and specialty breads. In New York it is perfectly reasonable to find such an establishment because folks here have a taste for just about everything. However, you’d be mostly wrong. Yes, they sell bread, muffins, bagels and other bakery items, but a quick tour of the store will reveal pizza, salads, sandwiches, soups, and prepared hot foods like baked ziti. The name clearly misleads.

So why do they still sport the word “Factory” in their name? The simple explanation is no doubt due to evolution; they once existed solely as a breadmaker, perhaps employing a factory-style process. But in this world of high-stakes branding, doesn’t the name risk dissappointing or alienating consumers?

Another popular chain that falsely calls itself a factory is The Cheesecake Factory. Here the naming is not quite as cloudy because they do offer a wide selection of cheesecakes. But primarily it is a restaurant, slightly up-market from Bennigan’s or Applebee’s, not a specialty dessert shoppe.

But they too kept Factory as part of the brand name. I suspect this is because consumers have a strange affection for the industrial age. It seems that in our information-and-communication-obsessed world of offices and cubicals, we yearn for a simpler time when you could leave work at 5pm and get on with the finer things in life … like eating. Methinks this the latest in the continuing series of perversions that plague our modern consumerist society.

Along similar lines is the tendency to use Warehouse as part of a name brand. It is more reasonable for consumers to visit a warehouse than a factory, so we can find more applicable uses for this word. Warehouse usually implies some reduced-price, wholesale, surplus, or otherwise no-nonsense alternative to buying retail goods, but I want to point out two instances (off the top of my head) where the naming goes pear-shaped.

UK mobile phone chain The Carphone Warehouse has one of the worst names I can think of. Not only is the term “carphone” a good ten years out of date, but the store isn’t even a warehouse. In fact, they sell phones and plans for the same price as everyone else on the High Street. Or consider The Spaghetti Warehouse (which has the awesome URL meatballs.com). It sounds like someplace Italian chefs might shop for ingredients, but it’s actually a restaurant. I don’t know about you, but I associate warehouses with buying, not eating. At least they have “restaurant” in the logo, which I actually rather like.

So the moral of the story is this: consumers have a certain unexplainable affection for warehouses, factories and the industrial past of our consumer ways. Using these terms in a brand name can have certain positive associations, but I, being a proponent of honest and straightforward branding, advise to only use them when you are, in actuality, a Factory or a Warehouse. Godspeed.

// a tale of Britain, New York, brands & branding
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