Word of the week: Croissant
Why did two new businesses choose the same arbitrary name?
To discover one startup called Croissant — I’m paraphrasing Oscar Wilde here — is a fluke. To stumble upon a second Croissant startup, a handful of weeks later, seems like more than mere coincidence.
One of the Croissant startups is Croissant.com, “a shopping tool for effortless reselling.” The other is an iPhone app that allows simultaneous posting on the Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky social-media platforms.
Why are they both named after a French baked good?
A lower-case croissant is, of course, a crescent-shaped pastry, but although croissant means “crescent” in French, croissants aren’t native to France: They were imported around 1839, when an Austrian artillery officer opened a Viennese bakery in Paris and began selling crescent-shaped kipferln (German for “crescents”), which had been baked in his native country since the 13th century, if not earlier.1 His recipe used brioche dough; what we now think of as the classic French croissant didn’t appear until 1915, when Sylvain Claudius Goy altered the recipe to use laminated yeast dough, which results in the famous flakiness.2 (I got this information from the Institute for Culinary Education’s website, where I also learned that January 30 is National Croissant Day.)
Neither of the two Croissant startups has anything to do with flour, butter, or yeast. That makes the name, in both cases, “arbitrary” in the trademark-law sense: a “real” (dictionary) word unrelated to the good or service it’s used for. (Apple is an arbitrary name for a technology company; Shell is an arbitrary name for a petroleum company. More about this sort of thing here.) Arbitrary names are stronger, legally speaking, than generic or descriptive or even suggestive names.
That’s all fine, but it doesn’t answer my question: Why this arbitrary name for two unrelated new businesses?
The “Shop Now, Sell Later” Croissant launched in July 2024, powered by $24 million in seed financing. I first learned about it in August, when Totally Recommend published a post headlined “I Was Not Paid by Croissant to Write This.”
Here’s how Totally Recommend described Croissant’s value proposition:
The gist: install the plug-in on your Chrome browser or download the app on your phone, and Croissant becomes your shopping buddy online. As you browse, it’ll give you a little nudge, showing how much they’d buy back the item you’re eyeing if you decide to sell it to them within about a year. No strings attached.
To consumers, this Croissant pitches itself as a “circular economy” hero. But the real value is to retailer partners, who see a 50 percent increase in average order value when shoppers activate Croissant. The company slogan could thus be more accurately rewritten as “Shop Now, and Then Shop Again, and Then Shop Some More.”
Or as Totally Recommend put it: “Croissant’s main aim is to get you to spend more money on full-price, brand new retail clothing—not build your wealth or reduce environmental waste.” (Boldface sic.) No surprise, really, when you consider that the company’s founder and CEO, John Howard, has spent his entire career in financial services, including nearly eight years at the global investment firm KKR. He has no retail experience.
The other Croissant, which launched on October 1, has more modest ambitions. For $2.99 a month, or $19.99 a year, people who post frequently on Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon — say, for their jobs — can easily duplicate their posts across platforms. The app-store copy: “Croissant makes cross-posting buttery smooth.”
There’s a stylized croissant in the logo, but no explanation for the name. (The company behind the Croissant app is called Innoveghtive, spelled that way because one of the founders is a Canadian app developer named Aaron Vegh. So now you know how to pronounce his last name.)
In the absence of name stories, I’m going to do some tentative speculation.
I quickly ruled out “shaped like a crescent moon” as the story in both cases. Fendi, the Italian designer brand, registered CROISSANT — a descriptive rather than arbitrary trademark — for its croissant-shaped bags, but I detected no lunar influence on the shopping site or the social-media app.
Maybe the association is with “growth”? “Croissant,” like “crescent,” has a Latin root: the verb crescere, “to grow or increase.” The reference is to the waxing moon, which was the original meaning of “crescent.” What business owner wouldn’t be thinking about growth? But that still doesn’t explain the use of an explicitly food-related French word.
A third rationalization for “Croissant” may be the association with appetite and tastiness. There is, after all, plenty of precedent for food-as-metaphor brand names. I’ve already mentioned Apple. An Australian body-lotion company is called Sundae. The name of a California-based mattress company, Avocado, suggests both “appealing” and “green” (in the environmental sense). There’s also Cake, a new members-only shopping platform whose tagline is “Shopping Just Got Sweeter.” (This Cake is one of more than 6,000 CAKEs in the trademark registry. Read more about the shopping Cake in Irene Kim (김애린)’s recent newsletter. Read more about the surfeit of “just” in names and taglines in my recent Medium story.)
But I think there may be another reason these two companies chose “Croissant,” and it would hinge on a misconception.
I propose that they looked at “croissant” and saw “cross” or “across,” as in “cross-posting” and “across retail channels,” and then decided to Frenchify it.
Here’s the thing: “Cross” and “across” are unrelated etymologically to “crescent.” They come from Latin crux, which originally (early 13th century) referred to “the instrument of crucifixion” and eventually meant “any object with that shape.” “Across” has meant “transverse” since the 16th century.
But the first syllable of “croissant” sounds like “cross,” at least to Anglophones. And that, I submit, is how we got from there to here: through a mis-hearing, or misinterpretation, that made sense at the time.
Is that, um, too flaky? If you have another theory — or better yet, an inside scoop — drop a note in the comments.
I remember learning that the croissant was invented after the Battle of Vienna (1683), in which the Holy Roman Empire defeated the Ottoman Empire; the crescent shape supposedly represented the moon on the Ottoman flag. I was misinformed: kipferln had already been around for at least three centuries before the battle.
Remember the cronut, the croissant-donut mashup that was all the rage in 2013? Or, even further back, Burger King’s croissan’wich, introduced in 1983? Hybridized croissants are still with us. The Sonic drive-in chain sells a bacon, egg, and cheese CroisSONIC, and registered a trademark for the term. Earlier this year a Korean bakery-cafe in Queens, New York, introduced the onioissant, aka the cronigiri. The name is a blend of “croissant” and “onigiri,” the triangular Japanese rice balls.
all the croissant portmantNOs have been killing me slowly, but Innoveghtive just finished the job
Okay, onioissant is possibly the worst #shitmanteau that ever shitmanteaued. As for the main topic, I speak French pretty well and even I have trouble pronouncing “croissant.” Why a company would adopt a name that’s so susceptible to mispronunciation is beyond me.