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ADR-0009: Digital Products Venture Adopts Public Brand "Devonside Labs"

Status

approved — ratified by the Founder on 2026-07-12.

Date

2026-07-11

Context

The venture internally tracked under the slug digital-products has operated under "Digital Products" as an internal working name only, per docs/company/brand-architecture.md and ventures/digital-products/venture.json (public_name_status: "not finalized"). Per ADR-0005, each venture may adopt its own independent, customer-facing brand unrelated to the parent company's name. A public brand name for this venture was needed before customer-facing work — including marketplace listings and packaged product visual assets — could proceed.

The chosen name, "Devonside Labs," is deliberately close in sound to "Devonshire" but is a distinct string. This is noted explicitly because docs/company/brand-architecture.md separately and explicitly prohibits inventing an umbrella brand such as "Devonshire Digital Labs" or "DDLabs" for the parent company. "Devonside Labs" is not that — it is a standalone venture brand, not a parent-company umbrella label — but the resemblance is close enough that it is worth recording deliberately rather than letting it accrete informally, consistent with the concern ADR-0005 raises about undocumented naming drift.

Decision

The venture with slug digital-products adopts "Devonside Labs" as its public-facing, customer-facing brand name. This replaces the internal working name "Digital Products" in all customer-facing contexts (product packaging, marketplace listings, marketing assets, Etsy shop name, etc.).

The internal slug digital-products does not change — per docs/standards/naming-standard.md, a slug is chosen to survive a brand change and does not need to match the eventual public brand name. Changing the slug itself would require its own deliberate, documented action and is out of scope for this decision.

"Devonside Labs" is a standalone venture brand. It does not imply, and must not be presented as, an umbrella brand for Devonshire Digital LLC or for any other venture. The prohibition on "Devonshire Digital Labs" / "DDLabs" as a parent-company umbrella brand (see docs/company/brand-architecture.md) is unaffected by this decision.

Consequences

  • ventures/digital-products/venture.json and docs/company/brand-architecture.md are updated to reflect "Devonside Labs" as the venture's public brand, superseding the "not finalized" / "internal working name" status recorded there previously.
  • Downstream customer-facing work (marketplace listings, product packaging, marketing visual assets, an Etsy shop) can now proceed under a real name rather than being blocked on this decision or drafted under a placeholder.
  • Because "Devonside Labs" and "Devonshire Digital LLC" sound similar, documentation and customer-facing copy must be deliberate about which entity is being referenced, particularly in any legal-disclosure context (see docs/company/brand-architecture.md on where the parent relationship must surface, e.g., an Etsy seller/legal field). Anyone drafting content for this venture should not casually shorten "Devonside Labs" in a way that collapses the distinction from "Devonshire."
  • This decision does not itself finalize any visual identity (logo, color, typography) for Devonside Labs — those remain open and are tracked separately (see the brand-asset-requirements work this ADR's Follow-up Actions point to).

Alternatives Considered

  • Keep "Digital Products" as a public-facing name. Rejected: the venture's own brand-architecture record already flagged this as an internal label not to be presented externally; it does not read as a real product/company name to customers.
  • Choose a name with no phonetic relationship to "Devonshire." Considered but not what the Founder decided; the Founder deliberately chose a name in the same naming family. Recorded here rather than silently accepted, so the resemblance is a documented, intentional choice rather than an accident future readers have to guess about.

Follow-up Actions

  • Update docs/company/brand-architecture.md's Digital Products section to reflect the new public brand name (done as part of this same change).
  • Update ventures/digital-products/venture.json (display_name, public_name_status, brand_type, notes) (done as part of this same change).
  • Record a venture-level pointer to this decision under ventures/digital-products/docs/decisions/ per the requirement in docs/company/brand-architecture.md that each venture's brand decision be recorded in its own directory (done as part of this same change).
  • Define visual-identity requirements for Devonside Labs (logo, logotype lockups, favicons, Etsy shop assets) — tracked in the work plan for this initiative, not in this ADR.
  • Reference this decision from the venture's portfolio entry per docs/company/portfolio-strategy.md, if not already current.

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