Fred is the New Black
by Fred on 14/12/06 at 10:38 am
1 comment
You know there was a stage when I was a little weird about my name.
One day, when I was attending a summer school in Denmark, about 12 years old, I experienced what can only be described as a non-acid, acid-flashback. Sent there by my Danish parents to learn the mother-tongue, I was already in a permanent state of bad mood. I was travelling on a bus on a school outing, when, half-asleep, I looked out the window and noticed we were passing a cemetery. Nothing unusual about that, until I noticed that on every gravestone the name ‘Fred’ was inscribed on the top.
I was terrified, until a teacher told me that the word ‘Fred’ means ‘Peace’ in Danish. Turns out that Fred is the Scandinavian equivalent of ‘Rest in Peace’. Ever since then, I’ve not been a huge fan of my tombstone name. I even thought of a message for when I kick the bucket: ‘Fred: Fred!’
Anyhow, since I recently hit 30, I’ve become more comfortable with the name. Even in Afrikaans it’s pretty cool (Fred Roed = Frikkie Pad). And now, in the past couple of days, I’ve been experiencing a bit of a Fred renaissance… especially since it’s become big business. The coincidence of finding all these in 3 days is too much – I just had to blog about it. Check it out:
Fred Bottled Water
The Cool Hunter profiled this bottled water phenomenon, the epitome of cool. This stuff even has its own MySpace profile and a ‘trendzine‘.
Fred’s Inc
America’s favourite hometown store. You can get furniture and apple pie.
Draw and Colour with Uncle Fred
For the kids. You just know that this is a safe place.
The Fred Factor
The new best-selling business book; a true story about some guy called Fred.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.
Karin
Dec 14th, 2006
The very first sat-nav (by Philips) was called Karin (over 15 years ago). My former partner was always fond to tell everyone he had a Karin in the car and never got lost
(until I send him packing, but that’s a different story)
ps just read The Fred Factor, you could do worse being compared to that, nice ’story’.