Voltive: New Name, Same Great Wire

We have a new name: Voltive. We'll be phasing it in across our entire product line and our website over the next few months. If you've bought or installed some of our speaker wire in the past, don't worry. Everything about our products remains the same. We're just going by a new name.

Changing names isn't something we wanted to do. Next is a name we love. It's the first name we chose for ourselves and it speaks to the forward looking nature of the products we build. More importantly, it's a name and logo that our customers have come to know us by. So it's only with great hesitation that we make such a big change.

But we had to.

As a name, Next has some issues. It's hard for search engines to tell us apart from the zillions of other companies that use the word 'Next' in their name. It's also hard to trademark and, without a trademark, we're locked out of major improvements to the customer experience on our Amazon listings. Finally, it's hard to get a good domain name with the word 'Next' in it and we're not crazy about our current domain (shop-next.com). We think it comes across as a bit amateurish.

So we have a new name: Voltive

It's got a few things going for it. It's only two syllables. If you see it spelled, you know how to say it; and if you hear it, you know how to spell it. Nobody else is using it, which means search engines will know who you mean if you search for us. It also means that the trademark was available, so we trademarked it. And that Voltive.com was available, so we got that as well.

This whole process is going to require a lot of work on our part. And a lot of money; single word .com domains are really expensive. We think it's worth it, though. A name is an important thing.

Our plan is to keep it simple for you. The same products you love. With a new name.