A few days ago, I went to the Divine Egypt show at the Metropolitan Museum here in NYC. The ancient Egyptian goddess Maat (also written Ma’at) was featured prominently, and it got me thinking back to the early days of this brand and the struggle to find the right name for it.
Naming was hard. At the time, it was just me, Fiona, and one pair of leggings that I was trying to figure out how to manufacture. I was excited but overwhelmed by all that had to be done in order to turn a pair of leggings into a company, and had little bandwidth for coming up with a name.
Feeling frustrated and almost desperate after a few months of pretty bad ideas, I turned to friends. Sitting in the cafe of the old Jiva Mukti yoga school on Broadway, my friend Angele blurted out a suggestion one day: “What about Matty?”. Matty was a definite no; a man’s nickname was not going to cut it. But it got me thinking about a play on the word ‘mat’, as in yoga mat. From there, the name came really easily. Within minutes I added an extra ‘A’ - and an umlaut - and MAÄT was born.
Although I felt very sure about the name, I did the requisite google search to see what would come up and learned about Maat, which was both the name of a goddess and a concept. Maat was the ancient Egyptian goddess of truth, justice, balance and cosmic order. Egyptians worshipped Maat by living life according to a ‘right attitude’. Maat was often depicted with an ostrich feather on her head, which played a central role in afterlife judgement - when someone died, their heart was weighed against her feather. If your heart was lighter than her feather, you made it to the afterlife. If it wasn’t, you didn’t. Maat was the reminder that how you conducted your life on a day to day basis mattered.
Maat, when used as a concept, meant to live truthfully, ethically, and from the heart in all matters involving family, community, the nation, the natural world, and the gods. The 7 principles of Maat are:
truth • justice • harmony • balance • order • reciprocity • propriety
Once I learned about Maat the goddess and Maat the concept, the name felt like cosmic alignment.
My best friend, Dahlia, is one of my favorite people in the world, and is also one of the few Egyptians I know. I’m sure that our friendship and the high regard in which I hold her had a halo effect - adding to my conviction in the name.
Even more meaningful (sorry bestie), was the framework that Maat as a concept laid out. Before MAÄT (the brand) even became a thing, I was aware that I wanted to do business the ‘right way’. However, compiling a set of guidelines for how I (and later ‘we’) wanted to do business felt daunting.
The 7 Principles of Maat are a tool I reflect on when weighing a decision that feels tough or unclear. They’re a cheat sheet that helps me to find the answer that's right for me and/or MAÄT. They’re not the only guidelines I use, of course, but I like that they’re a constant reminder of how I went from feeling like I’d never find the perfect name to being certain that MAÄT is the perfect name - I just had to keep trying, ask for help and trust that answer would come.