When we decided to start our dog breeding we already knew we wanted to do it as well and ‘proper’ as we could – this included having an official, registered Kennel Club breeder’s name for our kennels.
But what should we choose??
Over the last 10+ years we have gone over and come back to breeding dogs and have come up with a stupidly long list of potential kennel names to be known by.
Pretty much all of our kennel name ideas have been binned or lost but some have stuck with us and new ones pop up all of the time. We’ve wracked our brains, asked the kids for ideas and looked for inspiration everywhere we could think of for name ideas. Even though they were good, none of them ever seemed quite right.
Kennel Club Name Ideas
Some of the kids ideas over the years have been cute, funny and just plain old weird! Here’s a few that I can remember:
- DogMummy
- WeLoveDogs
- Dogs (!!!!)
- FluffyDogs
- SlobberyDogsDribble
- PinkDogs
- RainbowKisses
- Sparkles
- MinecraftIsAwesome
- Goldfish
I love my kids more than life, but you can see where I’m coming from about the names not being quite right…
Here are a few names we came up with over the years (that I can remember…)
- RedDogue
- StaffyAwesome
- DogueLovers
- RedDog
- ScarletHound
- RedMastiff
- RougeDogs
- RougeBordeaux/Mastiff
This is just a teeny, tiny snippet of names we have thought of over the years to write the whole list would be silly and take forever.
Ideally, we wanted something that would represent us as a family, or our love for dogs, our dedication to them and doing things right, a nod to our favourite breeds, ours or our kids’ names or our loved one’s names.
There are loads of things you could choose for a Kennel Club name, for us the choices seemed too much at times and we never settled on anything for too long.
There Are Some Rules
There are a few rules for choosing a Kennel Club name; you have to choose just one word – which is why most people choose to blend a few words together – and the word you choose must have between 4 and 12 characters.
You can’t use a breed name in your kennel name either, so something like RougeDogue wouldn’t be allowed. (There are some kennel names that include breed names or variations of them, so I’m assuming at the time that was allowed.)
You can’t copy anyone else’s name (obviously), you can’t use words like bitch, crufts, dog, kennel, champion or any other award title.
To be fair, the rules are more common sense than anything and so aren’t too restrictive when choosing your kennel name.
We have always had dogs, my husband and I both had dogs growing up and have always had dogs since we’ve been together. So it kind of made sense to have a career that we loved that involved them somehow!
Where Did Strawberieve Come From?
Before I started to (seriously) set up dog breeding in January 2020, I was working as a website designer and ran an online shop – which I loved, but always got drawn back to dogs.
One of the shops I ran online was called Strawberryeve. I came up with this name by combining my favourite fruit with one of my late Nan’s middle name.
She used to have a few allotments and was massively into baking and gardening, we spent most of our time together doing one or the other. (She was also a massive dog lover too.) She was a gigantic influence on my life and when she died I was devastated (still am).
One of my Nan’s middle names was Evelyn and she grew strawberries that we used to pick and eat fresh from the allotment. So it made perfect sense to me to somehow combine the words strawberries and Evelyn for a business name. To kind of thank her for everything and to honour her in some small way.
This was how I came up with Strawberryeve.
My other late Nan, Jean, was also a dog lover and a massive influence on my life, she died before Nan Evelyn and it still hasn’t sunk in that she’s gone. During my childhood, she had a brindle & white Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Winston – I remember that my Nan always called him WINSTONT with a T at the end lol. ❤ Bless her!!
I tried different combinations of both my late Nan’s names, but we couldn’t get it to work somehow.
When I decided to really make a go of dog breeding instead of online retail, I wanted to do something I loved, was passionate about and something my Nans would’ve loved too. I reminded myself of the rules surrounding choosing a kennel name and was hoping to use Strawberryeve. It just ‘fit’ somehow, like it was meant to be.
Sadly, Strawberryeve is just one letter too long!!! AAARRRGGHHHHHH!! I was gutted! I tried to come up with other ideas but none were any good in my mind.
So I tried changing the spelling and arrangement of strawberry and eve, which eventually gave me Strawberieve instead.
This worked for me. I loved it, my family loved it. It was meant to be!
I did worry that people would spell it in the traditional way of strawberry and not find us, but I soon got over that – there are so many unusual and complicated kennel names out there already that I thought we’d be ok.
I filled in the paperwork online to register our new Kennel Club name with me and my husband as joint owners in December 2020. (Before then I had been building and setting things up behind the scenes, also choosing and raising our future breeding bitch!)
Our registration was granted on 20th January 2021 and our certificate was sent out to us. We were so excited!!!!
We both think that this is the beginning of something special!!! We can’t wait to do our part in maintaining the already lovely Dogue de Bordeaux breed!! 🙂
I’m lucky to have had such fantastic, strong, gentle, loving and kind women in my life and heavily involved in my upbringing. I will always miss them both with all my heart. I hope we can do them both proud with Strawberieve!
