Building a Brand

The connection from livestock branding to marketing

I’ve had three different big ideas for starting a Substack that I couldn’t gain much traction on. Then I realized that a lot of the videos that my husband watches on YouTube relate to some type of home improvement/projects and I decided that this project, that is so deeply personal and important to me, should be where I go with my Substack so At the Flying Y was born.

The Flying Y (pictured above on a picnic table at the ranch) is the brand that my dad created for our family’s dude ranch. It has only been used on horses but can be used on other livestock. When building a livestock brand, you want something simple that won’t create hot spots that hurt the animal more. One iron brands are easier to use than two. (All of this comes from my husband who helped on out a couple of his family’s cattle ranches.) The Flying Y is simple and a one iron brand.

My dad came up with it because of the gap between mountains that is called the Sweetwater Gap. When you look at it from the right vantage point, it looks like a backwards Y.

When my sister and brother and I decided on divvying up the assets of the ranch, I asked for the brand. My brother has my dad’s brand, the Lazy B W, because those are also his initials. I wanted the Flying Y more for sentimentality than any other reason. We don’t plan to get any other livestock and currently none of our horses are sporting the Flying Y. A lot of horses don’t get branded anymore. When you want to get a brand inspection to transport your horses, you call a brand inspector to come out and look at your paperwork and he/she writes up a brand inspection report that gives a description of the horse and that seems to suffice. Not a lot of horse rustling going on in Wyoming these days. The only horse we have who has a brand is Daisy and she has a BLM wild horse brand.

Andy suggested calling our place The Flying Y, after the brand. Naming our cabin isn’t imperative and we will be the only ones who know it at that but it felt right to keep a piece of the ranch with the land.

I’m still working on the branding of the Substack, Instagram, and YouTube. I am a complete amateur and I want to get it right. But I also know that in trying to get it “right,” I run the risk of not doing it at all so I am willing to try some things out and change it up as I go along. I don’t have any background in communication or marketing so it’s a steep learning curve. I really want my logo to have a the Flying Y with the mountain in the background. Right now I think that is beyond my abilities. I purchased the Adobe Suite and sadly found out that it hasn’t gotten any easier than the last time I tried to use Photoshop. But I will keep working with it until I get a decent logo to start putting on my social media.

As I pondered the logo issue, I made the connection between today’s marketing and Old West branding and sure enough, that’s why we talk so much about company branding today. I should probably take the advice from this consulting firm and just hire someone to make the logo for me. But since I doubt that I will ever make any money from this, I don’t want to spend a lot to do so.

For those of you reading my work for the first time, thank you. I hope you subscribe and stick around for the journey that I am on. I hope to have a real logo soon so I can start “branding” my work.