"One investor criticised the German term"

When we returned from the trip that gave rise to our start-up, we did some brainstorming with friends. Someone jotted down ‘Tüten hüten’ (minding bags) on one of our countless post-it notes. We all liked it immediately. My then partner Christian and I wanted a noun, so we turned it into ‘Tütenhüter’ (bag minder). Finding a name was lots of fun overall.

We had ideas in English too, but deliberately opted for a German name because we wanted to establish the brand in German-speaking countries in particular. When we appeared on the Swiss Dragon’s Den TV show, we were instantly criticised for using a German term. One investor said that this would limit us and that we could forget about English-speaking sales markets. He claimed that all terms with accents are extremely problematic. But our products also sell very well in French-speaking Switzerland, and we’ve been supplying the entire EU since 2025. So far, so good. Ultimately, the word formation is simply a trade mark and it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand it in English or French.

No. The term ‘Tütenhüter’ is very distinctive, and people like it. However, some people also imagine it to mean all sorts of weird things. In my opinion, this is exactly what makes a good trade mark. It’s not obvious or boring, so people investigate it and talk about it, including on social media. That definitely helped us too.

We’re using an umbrella branding strategy, with the company name ‘böörds’ as the umbrella brand. From the start, we considered it important to push the umbrella brand as well as the product brand so that it would become well known and we could use it to launch further products later.

‘böörds’ is the German transliteration of the English word ‘birds’. We came up with the idea during our trip to Thailand. Travelling about in a minibus, we listened to lots of Swiss German songs, such as ‘Uf u dervo’ by Gölä and ‘E Vogel ohni Flügel’ by Peter Reber. These songs feature a bird that stands for freedom and independence. That’s exactly what we wanted with our own independent business. The two ‘ö’s represent Christian and me, the two founders.

We initially commissioned a graphic designer to create a logo for the word mark ‘Tütenhüter’. As Christian and I are both cheerful, we wanted the ‘Ü’s to be designed as smileys. However, the graphic designer then suggested that we depict ourselves, so the dots on the ‘Ü’ now symbolise our heads facing each other.

We then decided to apply this idea of depicting ourselves in the lettering to the umbrella trade mark. So for ‘böörds’ we came up with a double ‘ö’ in the form of an infinity sign, in which Christian and I are sitting opposite each other.

Visual language is very important for our brand identity. When we created the term ‘Tütenhüter’, we immediately saw our bag minder as a person: a dapper gentleman with a handlebar moustache who likes to avoid food waste and therefore wants to seal his bags properly. That same evening, we created a brief for a caricaturist who lovingly drew the gentleman by hand. Around three years later, he was joined by his partner ‘Tubeschruberi’. Our aim in using these figures was to tell a story and give our products a heart and soul. Producing goods in Switzerland is expensive. That means they need to have an appealing, high-quality appearance, so that they’re also suitable as gifts.

Christian and I both previously worked in product development. It therefore went without saying that we would register our trade marks as soon as they were created. We’ve always protected all trade marks as broadly as possible as a domain too. In addition to boeoerds.ch, böörds.ch and tütenhüter.ch, for example, we’ve also registered all the terms as .de, .at and .com domains. All addresses are redirected to www.böörds.ch.

Yes, we really searched through everything and checked whether something similar already existed.

There have been similar products. One has disappeared from the market, and the other doesn’t seem to be very successful. We’ve been successful with ‘Swiss Made’ and we’ve established strong brands, so it’s not easy for others to catch up with us.

As ‘böörds’ was a new, invented term, we didn’t need Google Ads in the first few years. We were so unique that we were always listed at the top of the search results. Of course, that means that people need to know the search term. However, my advice to everyone would be to choose a term that doesn’t exist yet.

Thank you very much for talking to us, Sandra!