Why precious?

Some people ask us: Why precious? I’m trying to write down some possible explanations here, so next time we’ll be able to send a link instead of typing the same words over and over again. I think this list will grow over the years …

A personal anecdote
Together with my now more than 90 year old, good friend Hanns I went on a short trip to New York City in 1997. It was my first time in the US, so I was pretty excited. During some of the nice talks we had, he kept talking about precious people � a term that was totally new to me in this context. I thought and still think it’s a good way to pay tribute to someone and also Hanns is one of the most precious people I know.

The look and the sound
The german word is “wertvoll” in this context: Useful. Valuable. Worthwile. Precious. When I first saw and heard the english translation, I immediately fell in love. I liked it typographically and how it sounds.

Market research
When googling for precious, you get some rather strange, some confusing and some more obvious results. Since Depeche Mode had a single called precious, everything’s pretty packed with them as well. But I was pretty amazed that I couldn’t find anything related to music or design (at least not on the surface). We also did (and will maybe continue sometime) a live music series called Precious Music here in Hamburg.

Precious coincidence
There’s a great band called Pleasure Forever and I used to listen to their first album a lot. The record contains a song called Stay Precious � I think this is the reason why our domain name is and will always be precious-forever.com.

Precise
Last but not least, Philipp told me just recently that he had an association with “precise” when he heard precious the first time. Perfectly fits to our deep love for details.

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