Just the right image, by any Otter name

“Vault Case” didn’t make the cut.

Nope, recalled Curt Richardson. “We wanted an animal. We wanted something that portrayed the outdoors.”

And so continued the brainstorming session with wife Nancy during a drive to Denver. What to call the line of waterproof boxes and cases for mobile devices that Richardson had begun developing in his garage in 1991.

“We were thinking Hammerhead Case and Seal Box” but those didn’t roll off the tongue or convey the message quite right either, said Richardson, founder and chairman of the Fort Collins-based company that would be named OtterBox, in a video released this summer that has become locally viral on YouTube.

Otters work hard, play hard and have fur that repels water. Perfect.

“Otter just had a nice ring to it,” Richardson said on the video. “It’s a fun animal. If you ever watch ’em at the ocean, you can sit there for hours and watch ’em play in the waves. Otter stuck.”

It stuck everywhere – from the logo Nancy designed to the metal otters that line the curvy slide that empties out into the company’s downtown Fort Collins lobby. It spawned in-house lingo such as “Otterific” and “Otterly awesome” that quickly catches on with new employees – or “Otterpups.” It reflected a corporate culture – they call it “Ottertude” – of hard work mixed with playfulness that earned the company seventh place among small to medium-sized U.S. firms last year in a national ranking of “Great Places to Work.”

We shudder to think what that corporate culture would have become if Hammerhead Case had won out.

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