Hiccup
Hiccup is a fashion platform built by people who understand speed. Its founders, Şükrü Dağdelen, Christopher Chaaya and Ronny Shibley, made their names at Gorillas, the app that turned ten-minute grocery delivery into a European habit. For the next company they chose fashion: small collections designed from live customer data, made in Türkiye, and moved from concept to wardrobe in a few weeks. Fast fashion, done honestly.
Everything But A Name
They came to us with more than most startups ever have. The supply chain was real, the tech was theirs, and they had already raised for and scaled one of Europe's fastest-growing companies. What they didn't have was a brand. No name, no logo, not even a working title anyone liked. And fashion is a harder crowd than groceries, they were entering the corner of the market shoppers trust least.
The brand strategy began by deciding what not to claim. Hiccup wouldn't dress up as a slow, artisanal label. It makes fast fashion, and it does lots of small things better than the alternative: smaller batches, shorter supply chains, less waste. We built the brand to say that plainly and keep its sense of humour.
The Sound Of A Movement
Naming is mostly crossing things out. We wrote hundreds of candidates across territories, light, motion, tomorrow words, pure sound, and killed nearly all of them. What sharpened along the way was the brief itself. The name should be an onomatopoeia, the sound of a movement, memorable without being literal.
Two made the final room. One was another small sound, a word we liked so much we've kept it for ourselves. The other was Hiccup, which turned out to be a unicorn. The name was available, everyone already knows the word, and it has a childlike silliness you can't manufacture. A hiccup is involuntary. It makes people smile. It meant everything, and it means nothing.
Şükrü, the CEO, ended the debate. He looked at the shortlist, pointed, and said, "I have no idea why, but this is it. This is the one." There is nothing better in a brand naming meeting than that sentence.
Hiccup - Brand identity
A Logo That Says Hi
We took three identity routes into the room, mostly to find out how loud this brand wanted to be. The bold one had a heavy condensed wordmark and pop graphics, the logo cropped so tight it barely fit the page. The soft one was rounded and friendly, and the founders clocked it straight away as too safe, too close to the dating apps. The third was purple and hand-drawn. The notes that came back all circled the same tension: unique versus universal.
So we kept the boldest skeleton and civilised it.
The final mark is a joke played straight. HICCUP is set in heavy capitals with one lowercase letter left in, the dotted i, so the word opens with a small "Hi". That accident became the whole system. The Hi is the app icon, the sticker, the parcel tape. The wordmark crops off the edges of pages, packaging and the top of the website, like a word that won't quite stay in its container. The colours are named Blush, Sand, Wet Sand, Daffodil and Shade, warm and almost domestic, with the yellow doing the pop. FH Oscar does the everyday talking. Ogg does the headlines.
We wrote it all into a fashion brand identity deck that reads more like an operating manual, how the logo behaves on scroll, how the brand speaks on social, which papers to print on. The e-commerce direction turned moods into navigation, quick links for Feeling Cute, Feeling Retro, Feeling Fun. The packaging is recycled card and unbleached string, with a swing tag you might keep.
Hiccup - Brand identity
Hiccup - fashion film
Ready Before The First Drop
A brand this young needed proof it could move, so we made some. Ahead of launch we produced early campaign photography and fashion film, shot warm to match the palette and cut for the feeds the brand would live in, plus a social playbook for everything that came after. Its last rule, always give it a Hiccup slant.
Funded Before A Single Garment Shipped
The result turned up before the brand did. With the strategy, name and identity in place, the founders secured pre-seed backing from Bek Ventures ahead of launch. A team with a track record helps. So does a brand that already knows exactly what it is.
Hiccup launched soon after and has kept the pace it promised: more than 150,000 shoppers so far, a team of more than 30 across London and Istanbul, and styles that go from concept to launch in under four weeks. Little changes, as the brand likes to say, lead to big things.
Let’s Work Together
We work with fashion and luxury brands at every stage, from early brand identity work to e-commerce builds and full campaign production. If you'd like to talk about a project, we'd love to hear from you.
Client
Project
HICCUP BRAND NAMING
BRAND IDENTITY
PRE-LAUNCH CAMPAIGN
CREDITS
MARK BAGE
CHRIS LAND
PAUL YOUNG
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