A big thank-you to everyone that has been curious enough to ask where FLEUX came from and how to pronounce it. I didn't think it would generate such curiosity but I'm more than happy to share what happened.
To state the blatantly obvious - names are really important as they represent our identity. Names (can) contain within them a broad history, personality and convey possibilities of the future. My goal was to conjure a name that lived up to this ethos.
After coming to the realization that I wanted to design a dive watch, I had the thought of naming the company after the person who was instrumental in developing diving into what it is today.
Henry Albert Fleuss (1851-1933) was a diving engineer and Master Diver who invented the modern rebreather in 1878. His invention used potash soaked yarn to scrub the carbon dioxide from a diver's exhalation while recycling the oxygen content to be used again. Fleuss' rebreather made his system capable of providing a diver with three hours of dive time.
Honouring Mr. Fleuss by naming the brand after him seemed like a no brainer - until I discovered someone else had the same thought and named a line of watches after him. A little deflated, I went back to the drawing board.
After brainstorming for a few days, I had a list of names that didn't make much sense, didn't look great graphically and/or had no meaning to me whatsoever. But what I also had was a list of descriptive words to describe what I wanted the brand to be.
The word Flux stared back at me. It perfectly describes how we plan to operate - small run batches of watch designs that are ever changing. (More on this later.) Should I have named the brand Flux? Nope, too short and unfortunately also taken. Argh.
What I really really really wanted was FLEUSS. But you can't always get what you want. And then it hit me - try combining the two words to see what you get. Bingo.
FLEUss + fluX = FLEUX
Now the question is, how does one pronounce FLEUX? It kind of looks French, so should it sound French?
Is La Croix "La Croy" or "La Cua"?
To be perfectly honest, I don't have a hard preference on how it should be pronounced. Personally, I pronounce FLEUX as "fl-ooxs" (probably because it's close to sounding like Fleuss) but I'll let you decide how you pronounce it.
- Edward -
*image credits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fleuss; http://historyofdivingmuseum.blogspot.com/2011/11/henry-fleuss-early-scuba-pioneer.html