Teflon Supplier Seeks Name That Will Stick
It may not be the challenge of the century, but Peter Churm has thrown down the gauntlet: As chairman of Fluorocarbon Inc. in Laguna Niguel, he is daring the public to engage its imagination and come up with a new moniker to replace his company’s nettlesome name.
The deadline: Aug. 31. The reward: 100 shares of company stock, valued at around $14 per share.
OK, so it’s not a million dollars, but Churm’s already gotten some 70 suggestions since the company’s annual meeting on June 6, when he announced that Fluorocarbon was planning a name change.
“They come in on scraps of paper, in formal letters, by fax,” Churm said Monday, the contest’s first official day. “A lot of them involve the word polymer. Some involve the word Teflon. Others involve taking our name and breaking it into initials. Some are really off the wall.”
Polymer? Teflon? How snappy an appellation can you dream up for a company that’s spent some three decades fashioning fixtures from fluorocarbon, the main ingredient in Teflon? Churm is well aware of the difficulties of the task ahead, but it’s worth it, he says.
No Business Lost
Fluorocarbon has been beset with an image problem caused by its not-so-harmless handle. To Churm, the name sounds too much like chlorofluorocarbons--the gases that are blamed for burning holes in the Earth’s ozone layer.
While the company has lost no business because of its name, Churm said that in the past six months he has been told by several stockbrokers that they will no longer pitch his stock to clients.
These brokers contend that it takes too much effort to explain to prospective shareholders that fluorocarbons are harmless solids, not destructive gases, and that Fluorocarbon is a good company, not a bad guy, Churm said. Hence the name change.
“If we had our preference we would like to have a name that more closely describes what we do,” Churm said. “We make industrial components . . . that go into other peoples’ machinery.”
Now, let’s face it, you can’t call the company Industrial Components, he says, because it’s so long and clumsy. But he’s not willing to give up on the idea of a name that describes what the company makes.
“Industrial components out of high performance polymers, plastic and rubber,” Churm said with a sigh. “All those are big words. We have to boil all that big wordage into something snappy and short and eye-catching. You see why we’re having a contest?”
Well, yes.
