The official birthday for Iridesco is January 3rd, 2003. About a week before that, Danny and I were deciding the name for our soon-to-be company over AIM. We both threw out a bunch of words and phrases, and here’s a partial list:

muse, wind up (after The Wind Up Bird Chronicles), swivel, hairdo, square melons, two prongs, rotary, iridescent, blue light basement, banana fish, guava, bpm, velcro, f64 (lens opening), red bean

After a few days we came back to this list and picked out the ones we like better, and ‘iridescent’ stood out. It seems now that we didn’t try to think of words with more than two syllables - maybe we should’ve done that and given ‘iridescent’ a stiffer challenge. Looking at the transcript now, I noticed a few things - 1) we sounded really young, 2) we had no idea what we’re doing (which is kind of nice), 3) we really liked ‘wind up’, 4) Danny threw out the word ‘iridescent’ and neither of us made any comments about it, but later we were both drawn to it.

We didn’t like how the word ‘iridescent’ ends, and we wanted a more ‘uplifting’ sound. So we just chopped it off, and ended it with an ‘o’. We’re no disco fans, but it stuck.

We also liked ‘guava’, both being fans of the fruit, and we didn’t give up on the word. More on that later.