Our Company Is Named ENGINE Industries -- Why?

Our company is named ENGINE Industries. But why? That’s what keeps you up at night. WHY?

We came up with engine first (more on that in a minute), but needed a word to go with it since some hard-working domain campers have locked down engine.com for no good reason. We liked industries since it sounds, yes, industrious, and since the plurality implies we do a bunch of different things. Which we do. Plus it plays into the same kind of mechanical, utilitarian imagery as engine, and there’s a little near-rhyme in engine and indus. ENGINE Visions or ENGINE Enterprises (or whatever) sound jarring.

So, back to engine — it comes from a quote by Ernest Hemingway…

Book is like engine.

Hemingway and a vehicle
that contains an engine

It’s a really rich image. Writing a book is like building an engine. All the pieces have to work together. Kind of like websites, too.

There’s kind of two ways to read the line, as it relates to websites. Obviously Hems didn’t know he was talking about websites at the time, but so what.

If we think of a book as a creative thing, and an engine as a useful tool, then we can look at a business website as sort of a book about engines. Like using expressive web design to present an e-commerce system. Does that make sense?

On the flipside, there’s also using rock-solid web development to back up something pretty. Like an engine that drives a book, or a stout CMS that powers a fashion blog. Is this sounding like 3 a.m. wisdom?

It’s a great metaphor forwards and backwards. Our clients need their sites to run like great engines and look like great books. Final bonus nugget: we deal with search engines, so. Engine.

(The quote itself isn’t actually from a book. The big fella delivered it while promoting Across the River and Into the Trees, a late-career novel widely described as self-parody. The minorest of minor Hemingway; I don’t know anybody who’s read it. Of course, the rest of the quote shows Pops sailing into mock bravado…

Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers. Book is like engine. We have to slack her off gradually.

…but we’ll ignore all that.)