Exactly one year ago, Susann and I decided to found the Daikon Media GbR here in Leipzig, Germany. It wasn’t only a decision for this beautiful city with its rich culture and cheap rents, it was also a decision against another year in New Zealand, where we both lived and worked together before.

Today, I am going to tell the short, but hopefully interesting story of our company, beginning with its name.

[ˈdaɪ.kɒn ˈmiː.di.ə]

Sometimes, there is an obvious connection between a company name and what it does (like Microsoft obviously develops Microcomputer Software) and sometimes it sounds completely arbitrary. Since Daikon is the Japanese name of a long white radish and we’re obviously neither food retailers nor cooks, you might think, that our company name is totally made up, right? Right? Wrong.

Actually, we described exactly what we’re doing: Digital Content. Using the same shortening technique as Microsoft did, the acronym of Digital Content is Dicon. But since this name was occupied by a hundred other companies (like a German consulting firm or a Nigerian armaments group), we couldn’t use it without starting our business with dozens of trademark violations. Then Susann was struck by a brainwave. As a big fan of Japan, the word Daikon was suddenly in her mind and the solution to our problem. Why not taking a name, that sounds the same, but looks different? So Dicon became Daikon and a reddish became our company logo.

The Root of All Good

The penny dropped. And after we’ve chosen Daikon Media as our company name, things started to happen very fast. We’ve created our company logo, that is basically a stylized reddish planted in the ground, invented our company slogan, “The Root of All Good” (which is not only a good pun but also a positive inversion of a well-known idiom), and started to work. And since day 1, the Daikon Media GbR had a clean profile, trusted business partners, was break even and still is.

Plans for the Future

We haven’t, however, reached the end of the story. For the next year, we have three ambitious goals we want to achieve.

1. Daikon Media goes YouTube: We want to create a YouTube channel to start making let’s play videos.
2. Daikon Media goes bigger: We want to expand our team and let another reddish join our daikon family.
3. Daikon Media goes international: We want to start another world trip in order to expand our global business network.

So stay with us, stay in touch on Twitter and our Blog and we all can be excited to experience another great year of Daikon Media.