It’s one year today since I revealed the name of my shoe label: Løvinde. While I’ve previously touched on the power of a name and the significance and identity a name carries, there’s another level to this I haven’t spoken about publicly before.

They say you can’t choose your family, well… my family chose me! I’ve been blessed with incredible parents who adopted me as a newborn baby. I’ve never known anything different, my parents are my parents and they have loved me well and given their all to raise me and provide me with so much in life. However, being adopted means I’ve had no idea about my biological background: what my genetic makeup is, what medical issues are in my family line, and so on. To be honest, I’d never given this much thought… until recently.

So how does this tie into Løvinde?

I’ve previously told the story of how I came up with the name. But I haven’t told you the incredible story of what happened next…

When I came home that night and asked Andrew what he thought of “Løvinde”, he was very positive… then he said something really interesting. “Babe, what if you were Danish, or turned out to have Scandinavian heritage?”

You can see where this is going.

Having fallen in love with Løvinde, we set about registering it – as a company, and as a portfolio of web domains. Can you believe the .com was available?? It was all very much feeling like it was meant to be.

Then I did a DNA test. Andrew, always thinking ahead, decided to film the moment I accessed the results…

The interesting thing is, the testing company keeps redoing the results as they get more data. I was disappointed to find out that after a major update, the Scandinavian component had dropped significantly. Was it wrong? Had I believed there was some kind of divine connection for nothing?

As it turns out, the models have been updated again – so they’re more accurate than ever – and my heritage is British/Irish/Scottish, and…. Danish. Not Scandinavian, Danish specifically. Wow!

So there you go… that’s a little window into me, and the remarkable love story of how I didn’t choose a name… but a name chose me!

Between now and launch, there’s still a lot more choices to be made – certain leather, packaging materials, logistics partners, and so on – but of course it’s all a labour of love when it comes to Løvinde. 🖤

Zan xo