I‘ve written this blog post for days in my head, and now that it’s time for me to ACTUALLY write this post, I don’t even know where to begin. To say I’m excited would be an understatement. To say we haven’t been busy this past week would be a Big Fat Lie. To say my kids have not eaten perfectly executed meals because Mom and Dad are up to their eyeballs in work to make this happen would be The Truth.
So here goes.
As of today, this blog is no longer called Simple Mom. It’s called The Art of Simple.
What what? you may be asking. Why on earth would we change the name of a six-year-old, well-established blog? A good question, and one that, quite honestly, kept me from doing this for the past three years when I’ve wanted to change the blog’s name.
But a few weekends ago, I was bemoaning the name Simple Mom to Kyle for the eighteen-thousandth time, and he finally said, “Well… Why don’t we change it?”
“We can’t!” I replied incredulously.
“Why not?” he asked. I paused. And then I paused some more. “Well, because it’s too established. You can’t just change a well-established brand name.”
“Sure you can. Brands do it all the time,” Kyle retorted.
I had no answer.
So we thought about it, racked our brains, and tried on all sorts of possibilities. For hours. We knew we still wanted something about simple living, because well, that’s what this blog is about. We thought about the tagline—the art and science of simple living. That was a bit too long, but there was something there.
And then it hit us. The Art of Simple. It was so… simple. And yet, it felt exactly right as soon as we tried it on. I love that it’s just… simple. Not simple living. Not living simply. Not simple something. It’s simply the art of simple—what it means as a way of life, a way of thinking, a way of being, and why it matters both now and for eternity.
It feels just perfect.
We’ll still write about parenthood occasionally like we always do, but now that we don’t have “Mom” in the title, we can better include our non-mom readers, as well as write for an even broader demographic.
Because you know what?
1. Believe it or not, we have a sizeable non-mom audience.
According to statistics, 20% of our readers are male. (We’re pretty sure you’re closet readers, you males.) And according to commenters, we also have quite a few women readers who aren’t parents. As The Art of Simple, you’ll feel more welcome. Because you are.
You may even feel more comfortable sharing posts from here now. I heard from a twenty-something guy who said he reads this blog but never shares posts he likes because then he’s admitting to reading a blog called Simple MOM. Understandable.
2. It became apparent to me around 2010 that the blog is more about living simply than about parenting.
We write about parenting issues, of course, but it’s all under the larger umbrella topic of Simple Living… and we like it that way. A0S better matches the content we already publish.
3. My name isn’t Simple Mom.
Never has been. It doesn’t happen much anymore, but when people meet me, or when they refer to me online, they sometimes call me “Simple Mom.” I never saw that coming. I’ll be standing in the grocery aisle debating diced tomato brands and I’ll suddenly hear, “Hey! Are you the Simple Mom?”
It’s funny, really. Since the blog is a community site, the focus can now be on the content, and not so much the name. AoS embodies the discussions we have here collectively.
So… What now?
In all honesty, the blog’s not really going to change that much. The name now simply better matches the content. We’ll still write the same sort of stuff, but perhaps we’ll be able to draw in an even wider audience—people from all walks of life who are interested in living a bit simpler.
