Maremoto Naming a Home for Visionary Change

Todo me lo regala el maremoto

To be Latino in the U.S. today is to have lived through violent rejection—or to be experiencing it now. Maremoto is working to shift the conditions for Latino communities in the United States. They are building infrastructure that will ensure Latinos can lead in politics, culture, and media. 

Operating as a house of brands, or an umbrella organization overseeing multiple brands each with their distinct strategies and identities, Maremoto needed a name expansive enough to hold both its existing and future initiatives including but not limited to a content creation studio, a guided cultural immersion in Mexico City, a talent incubator, and programs for young, Latino men.

Before coming to Champions, the team at Maremoto had generated more than 400 names with AI by prompting dozens of conceptual territories in both English and Spanish: the solar system, ecology, mythology, elemental forces, and idioms. AI had produced volume, variety, and linguistic patterning but no suggestion carried quite enough cultural voltage or emotional resonance. 

AI can generate names, but it cannot name. 

When Champions onboarded, we started with a Brand Story that captured both the history of rejection and the force of renewal; both pain and possibility.

Grounded in the Brand Story, we explored names based on their imaginative potential–their ability to open a world. 

The final name, brought a feeling of both turbulence and inevitability–a force gathering until it became impossible to contain, reshaping everything in its path. 

Latinos are the future. With Maremoto, we build the tidal wave.

As the name was socialized, we encountered apprehension. A maremoto wipes out everything in its path. It carries danger, destruction, scale, and consequence. Ultimately it was exactly this scale of impact that made it right.

The name Maremoto also offered something more subtle: a sense of rhythm. Maremoto gives the org freedom to be confident in the moment of the wave’s impact but also in its quieter phases–when energy is gathering, when the swell is forming, and when the fury returns to the center of the sea. It’s reflective of the real tide of collective human energy: quiet, rising, explosive, and restorative.

A team member recalled a poem they had studied in university, also titled “Maremoto.” In it, Pablo Neruda writes, “Todo me lo regala el maremoto ” alluding to the strange and miraculous gifts brought by the sea.

The name was taking root, reinforced by cultural references, like Neruda’s poem, where strange and beautiful things emerge in the wake of turmoil. 

Naming did not create this identity; it revealed it. And once the name was chosen, the rest of the brand system unlocked.