If you’re just starting out with your private practice, no doubt you’ve given some thought to what you want to call it. You may have already given it a name – or named it after yourself! Where ever you’re at in the branding process, we at Healthie are here to walk you through it step by step, answering questions like how do I get a logo for my brand? to do I need to trademark my practice’s name? Don’t worry. The answers are a lot less complicated than you think!

Building a brand development strategy

While it may seem like nothing important to you, the name of your wellness business is your brand. It’s a company – it’s likely an LLC (if it’s not yet, don’t worry – we’ll walk you through that too).

When naming your wellness business, the thing to keep in mind is your goal. If you hope to one day have a team of wellness professionals working at your practice, you may a name that sounds more like an enterprise. If it’s just you, and you’re not so sure you want to use your name, you may want to pull from your practice’s food philosophy. What is unique about your approach? One last thing to note is that you’ll want your practice’s name to fit your future ambitions. If you’re living in New York City, but aren’t sure you’ll always want to live there, you may want to avoid regional names in case you want to bring your practice with you when you move.

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Creating a logo that reflects your wellness brand

Logos are a great way to brand your company. It’s something that is easily recognizable and looks great on a website or business card. It also gives your company a uniform look so no matter where it’s represented, it can look clean and official. Logos will tell your clients a lot about your company identity, what your represent, and what kind of clients you’re hoping to attract.

Your logo can be just text like Google or Coca-Cola.

In both these examples, the text and color combination allows the brand to be recognizable regardless of where it’s used. If you’re interested in this kind of logo, it is easy enough to do it yourself. Just be sure that the font you are using in your logo is available for commercial use and that you are abiding by its copyright laws.

You can also include abstract symbols in your wellness brand like Starbucks or Nike. There’s no logic to attaching the Nike check to athletic wear or the Starbucks mermaid to coffee, but there needn’t be. It’s part of the brand’s identity.

If you are looking to have a logo more along these lines, it may be helpful to consider hiring a graphic designer. It can be very expensive to go through a firm that creates logos, you can cut the cost by turning to freelance designers whose prices will vary considerably. There are websites like Fiverr where you can hire an artist to put together a logo for you for a starting price of $5 or sites like 99designs where prices start at $299 but freelance artists will send in their designs to give you up to about 100 uniquely made designs for you to chose from. If you decide to go with a “clipart” option, while it’s free, be sure to check the image copyrights. It may not apply to logos.

Once you create your logo, you can upload it to your Healthie profile, and create consistent color scheme.

What to Know About Trademarks

Trademarks are important consider if you are planning to sell a product or believe that there is a reason someone would try to copy your idea. A trademark will give you ownership of a brand name and logo and is especially useful if you want to market a unique wellness product or service. If that is not something your private practice is after, trademarks may take more time and money than they’re worth.

Last but not least, we should address the issue of copyrights. When it comes to creating a logo yourself, if you want to use preexisting fonts or images (even free fonts and images) be sure to check what their copyright laws are. Stock image sites like Shutterstock.com do not allow their images to be used in logos unless you purchase the image rights which may be more than you’re willing to spend. Fonts may also protected by copyrights.