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How we renamed our Design Converter to Magical Ass

153 points by kgoedecke ↗ HN
So here we go, our rebranding is done. New logo, new domain, what could go wrong.

We provide a tool to convert design files between Figma, XD, Sketch, Figma, PDF and more and have recently rebranded it from "XD2Sketch" to "Magicul". We started out as a simple tool to allow users to import XD files in Sketch hence the name XD2Sketch but soon added more features. The name just didn't make sense anymore. Magicul initially seemed to be a great name, but turned out to be a bit of an interesting pick when translated to French.

We've sent out a newsletter to our customers to let them know about the changes and here's what one of our users replied:

Hey folks,

While I understand that you guys probably hope to operate primarily in English, I think it needs to be mentioned that your brand name "Magicul" in french, literally means "Magical ass"... but the real kicker is the .io of the domain, which literally means input & output...

So here goes the bad news... The entire french community is reading your brand name - literally - as: Magical ass (dot) in & out.

And then there's the logo itself... which is a hole with a hat.

Christ. You can't make this stuff up. This is ugh, umm, a brutally unfortunate brand?...lol

I'm in Quebec, Canada, where french is dominant and so I'm keenly aware of this - and so are my partners, colleagues and friends. We all had a good laugh.

Don't know what else to say...?

Bonne chance mes amis!

Have a good one,

- A fan of your work in Montreal.

You can checkout our website here: https://magicul.io

I just thought this was too hilarious to not share.

98 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] thread
messutied
Oh man, that's a classic, always check what your name idea means in different languages ^^ it's actually close to "ass" in Spanish too (culo).

Do you plan to keep the new name? Personally I don't think is so bad.

kgoedecke
I think we're already too invested. The SEO took a big hit and I think changing it again would be even worse for our organic traffic. On top of that I think its hilarious and I you know what they say "There's no such thing as bad publicity".
theandrewbailey
You could add a magical donkey somewhere.
Scarblac
It doesn't mean that type of ass.
dylan604
no, but it'd be a funny nod anyways.
michelpp
double entendre: "A phrase that has two meanings, especially where one is innocent and literal, the other risqué, bawdy, or ironic; an innuendo."
scrollaway
The innuendo doesn’t work in French.
Scarblac
Yes, but a French reader who sees the French word "cul" (butt) won't realize there is also the word ass in English, and that donkeys are also called ass in that language. It's just far fetched.
willcipriano
The French are probably the best people to do this to, they have a sense of humor about this sort of thing. I'd add a note in French in your FAQ and leave it as is. It may even net you customers.
gnarbarian
see coq

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq

mauvehaus
It also means cock in the sense of what's more commonly (though less accurately) called a rooster (hens roost too). Coq au vin is a tough old male chicken cooked in wine, not a sausage dish.
SilasX
Or “bit”, heavily used in computing, which sounds like the French equivalent of “cock”:

>> Bite » est une expression d'argot désignant vulgairement le pénis.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bite

eastbound
Don’t worry, Audi made the same mistake. Do you know how to call a turd in French?

e-tron.

And yes, Audi kept the same name in France.

chrisandchris
Some people nearly tried to sell the new Coca-Cola brand "Fuze tea" in Switzerland where "Fuze" spoken in swiss german is very close to a womens sexual organ (in a disrespectful way). So they changed the name to "fuse tea". Close shot.
Doxin
Glass is spelled with one S in dutch, So you can imagine the raised eyebrows Glassex would produce. They ran a series of commercials about the product ending with "strange name though."

problem solved.

spaetzleesser
Reminds me of the Mitsubishi Pajero which translates to "wanker" in Spanish. Or a long time ago we named projects after mountains in the alps. Once we got to "Wank" luckily our born in England intern told us that maybe this wasn't a good idea.
pen2l
Your site is quite nice and responsive, made me think of Stripe's interface. May I ask what frontend you've built this on? Or really any details of your process of frontend rebuild you'd like to share?

The French-speaking populace can take jokes like this, so you're safe. :)

kgoedecke
Heya, we've build the site in NextJS using FelaJS and xState. I really can't recommend xState, but we're really happy with NextJS and Vercel in general. Our designer works in Figma and thats were we build the designs first.
davidkpiano
Hey, XState creator here. What did you not like about XState? Hopefully there are areas we can improve on or questions we can answer. Or maybe it wasn't appropriate for the project?
permo-w
I'm gonna be quite pedantic, nitpicking and killjoy-y here, so don't read on if you'll be annoyed by that

>"The entire french community"

seems like a huge exaggeration. input/output is i/o, not io. while that's a relatively small difference, it's enough that without context I'd never read io as input output. also I'd question how much of the French [presumably design?] community at large has even heard of or seen i/o as a symbol for input/output

nbzso
Magical ass or not, you offer no trial and $94/file -1 file with up to 50 artboards. $124/file - 1 file with unlimited artboards. Hard no from me and my team.
qiller
Hard agree. I like the converter idea, but having used similar tools in the past (Avocode and others), there are always some kind of minor but annoying issues. Having a preview or a trial would be good to have to avoid surprises later.
kgoedecke
Appreciate the honest feedback. We get that a lot actually, if you reach out to our customer support team we can convert a small file for free for you. Our converter literally almost everything, prototyping, components and what not. Maybe we should add a free trial tho.
latexr
> We get that a lot actually

Now think of all the people who never tell you and just move on. They don’t get to use a useful tool and you don’t get the customer. Lose-lose.

> if you reach out to our customer support team we can convert a small file for free for you.

Which costs you money via the time spent on support.

> Maybe we should add a free trial tho.

From your grandparent comment, it seems you offer different prices based on the number of artboards. Maybe the trial is instead a free tier which only works on files up to X MB in size with at most Y artboards.

eurasiantiger
But then you can’t test the conversion on realistic ”production” files, and you may miss something. Better not limit features, only amount of files and speed of conversion (the queue / progress bar is a good place to remind free users of the fact.)

This also nets the company lots of good karma by letting many others out of one-off binds where they are stuck with a file they cannot open.

Getting the company name out there as a dependable savior will make your brand stand out in casual conversations.

Then it will be an easy sell to agencies that actually use these kinds of products and are willing to pay for them.

However, don’t try to upsell from the free tier, and don’t make it annoying to use. It will make people avoid the free service. You want users to tell others of the great service that saved their bum just before the looming deadline.

And with that particular name, the company could even base its marketing on literally that.

justsomehnguy
> Now think of all the people who never tell you and just move on.

This.

> Which costs you money via the time spent on support

And this.

But the most important thing is what for any (we based) service I expect a zero amount of friction.

Contacting support is way too much for my 21sr century ass.

Edit: I leave the typos as a reminder not to drink and comment.

qiller
I think most concerns come a lot from the point of view of trust that the converter does the right thing. If I take a designer XD file, convert it to Figma and give it to a developer for implementation, I want to be sure that they don’t waste billable hours making a wrong gradient or battle some odd masking issue. As a consulting shop, we tried some tools, for example Avocode - but ultimately cancelled it. Tools were usually 95% correct, but because of the remaining 5% we’d end up still paying for the zoo of Figma/Sketch/Adobe/Invision. Oh, and still needed those cause designers would forget to mark assets as exportable and Zeplin can’t pull assets unless that’s done. </rant> :)

Sooo, a preview or a trial or some recourse like easier refunds (even back into credits) would be to improve the perception

nbzso
I have a gripe with all the design tools that don't offer interoperability. You can import Sketch file in Figma, but you cannot export to Sketch.

I understand the reasons behind this decision-making process, but all of this "silo" mentality is pushing me to use more code and less design tools for my clients DS.

GuB-42
That why it may be a problem. French people are probably going to be amused, you may even get extra publicity.

But with prices like these you are probably targeting companies, not person

psonic
Heya, in italian sounds a lot like "magic ass" too.
jrm4
Ha, I'm an American who's reasonably proficient in Spanish and my brain did quickly see "Magic Culo."
eurasiantiger
The term cul-de-sac is not that uncommon in American English, given the amount of suburbs having them.
MonkeyMalarky
Really wondering about the origin of that phrase. The literal translation is "ass of bag"?
C4stor
Since a bag ("sac") has no exit hole ("cul"), and so a "cul-de-sac" is a (I guess 2nd degree ?) way of saying "way with no exit".
jaclaz
If you translate (instead of ass) cul as "bottom", it is more like the "bottom of a sack" (i.e. no-exit), if your interpretation was correct, it would be a no-cul-de-sac.
pessimizer
Or "way with one exit, and it's behind you."
bombcar
Fun fact: Tolkien hated English "borrowing" words from other languages that we had already - so he named his hero Bilbo Baggins (bag ends) of Bag End - where Bag End literally is the English for cul-de-sac (end of bag).
msk-lywenn
My colleague and I are laughing so much right now, thank you very much. I'm in tears. "Tant que ça fait pas de la merde" he just replied, meaning "as long as it's not outputting shit". This is amazing.
tpoacher
well they did say it can transform to any format.
rayiner
It’s a real testament to how far French as fallen as the default language of international business and commerce that it didn’t occur to anybody to check on this.
sjburt
That happened something like 100 years ago.
qalmakka
This is indeed hilarious. Even for an Italian ear it kinda sounds like that.

I hope that in Spanish or Portuguese it doesn't evoke that kind of feeling too, but I am afraid it probably does.

You probably made your product very hilarious (and probably hard to sell) for the entirety of the Romance-speaking market...

dimatura
Yeah, it does. "Culio" could be seen as the past tense of the verb "culear" - derived from the word for ass - and which, as far as I know, is a naughty word in most of latin america.
alexaholic
> You probably made your product very hilarious (and probably hard to sell) for the entirety of the Romance-speaking market...

Not quite the entirety of it: "magicul" means "magical" in Romanian.

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wonderbore
So what? Italian automobile giant Fiat recently turned "FCA", which is the Italian equivalent of "PSSY"

It's fine, people joke and then move onto the next TikTok video.

dimatura
You know this SUV, the Pajero? IIRC they changed its name for the chilean market, because there "pajero" is well established slang that translates roughly to "wanker", but with extra connotations of laziness and weakness.
robocat
I presume pajero is slang because “hacer la paja” or “hacer paja” is slang for masterbate. The FCA example is “fica” in Italian? Similar to “figa” in Spanish?

As a foreigner in Spain I really enjoyed learning slang and then speaking inappropriate double entendres[1] - acting innocently as though I had made an honest mistake - entertaining whoever I was talking to.

Or honest mistakes too: I remember being laughed at for saying I was being followed around by a bunch of little penises when I meant to say little chickens.

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/double_entendre “The phrase has not been used in French for centuries and would be ungrammatical in modern French”

dimatura
Ha, yes, that's the etymology for pajero, hence the similarity to "wanker" :D
LinAGKar
Same with Honda Fitta, with fitta being Swedish for pussy. And kiss, famously the name of a band, is Swedish for pee. Stadler also named one of their trains KISS, though in Sweden they marketed it by the working name Dosto.
olyjohn
I'm skeptical about the truth of the Honda Fitta ever being considered for the name. And I'm calling full BS on it.

Doing a little research on this... There's only a few articles, mostly quoting random people on the Internet. No good verified sources on it. Wikipedia mentions it too, but only links to those same articles.

Long before the Fit was ever a car, Honda already made a Jazz in Europe (which was called the Honda City in other markets). And it would make sense for the current Jazz to succeed that car. It would make less sense for them to rename it to the Fit for Europe, as the Jazz was already a recognized model.

Asmod4n
In Germany Ford sold a sports Coupé named cougar
PlatinumHarp
In north america it was sold as the Mercury Cougar.
MonkeyMalarky
On a tangent, my favourite French expression for nitpicking is "enculer les mouche".
bambax
When the Australian government decided to cancel the order of a dozen of French submarines, they announced that they had made a new special alliance with the US and the UK. The name of the alliance is "AUKUS" (Australia-UK-US).

But "au cul" in French of course means "(fuck) in the ass". "Vous l'avez dans le cul" means "you've been fucked in the ass".

As the cancelling of the order was received by France as a giant betrayal from Australia, it's believed the name of the alliance was an intentional insult from people who knew what they were doing.

I don't know if that's true but I tend to believe it is.

EZ-Cheeze
Legally you can't call a company Magical Ass otherwise it would be common like novelty plates

But a company CREATING Magical Ass, this would obviously be one doing perfect CGI humans.

Michelangelo-level perfection and pathos at 60fps+ = direct hijack into the divine experience centers of your brain

Big Thiel truth here, yeah I'm already working on it

https://medium.com/@auren/why-the-famous-peter-thiel-intervi...

Fiahil
> We've sent out a newsletter to our customers to let them know about the changes and here's what one of our users replied

Thank you, I can't help but laugh at the idea that they received what looked like a out-of-season april fool's :D

Most important question are you keeping the brand ? As the French person, I can assure you that everyone will read "magic ass" before anything else.

wazoox
You're not alone; Audi proudly sells the E-tron, which in French means "turd", plain and simple.
mmmpop
My father-in-law has an E-tron, he's gonna get a kick out of that.
nicbou
And then there's the Buick LaCross, or Buick TheScam