You’ve earned the right to wear something worth talking about.

When we first started designing our signature bold shirts, we wanted a name that captured what we were doing - which was, depending on your point of view, either outrageous or magnificent, and usually both. We also wanted to acknowledge the place we'd landed in. Our first operation was in Bollington, a small mill town south of Manchester, in a building called Adelphi Mill, completed in 1856. Bollington was a major centre for cotton spinning from the late 18th to the mid-20th centuries. The bones of the place felt right.

The mills of the 1800s had a darker legacy, though. The poet William Blake described them as "dark Satanic Mills" in his poem *Jerusalem* - a phrase that has carried a particular menace ever since. We liked the edge of it. We called ourselves Satanic Mill.

A lot of our early customers loved it. The name felt appropriately provocative for a brand that was never going to blend in. Then reality arrived, in three acts.

First, several retailers in Canada flatly refused to stock a brand with "Satan" in the name. One store owner told us, with some certainty, that his shop would be ‘firebombed’ if he put our shirts on his shelves. Second, a German gentleman tried on one of our shirts and loved it, right up until he noticed the yoke label. He threw the garment at the woman assisting him and walked out without a word. Third, our new banking partner mentioned almost as an aside that none of our emails had been reaching them. It turned out "Satanic" was on their blacklist. Every email sent from satanicmill.com had been going straight to junk.

The name had to go.

The solution, when it came, was elegant enough that we're slightly annoyed we didn't think of it sooner. William Blake wrote the poem. The poem mentioned the mills. So: drop "Satanic", keep "Mill", replace it with the name of the man who wrote the words in the first place.

BLAKE MILL.