About
It was the summer of 2010 when I decided to start a company that designs, tests, and makes products for the discerning motorcycle tourer. Fresh from a 2-month-long trip to the northeastern parts of India, with a rather short sojourn into Bhutan, I was at home thinking of what next. I had not cleared my final attempt at the civil services exam and had been out of the corporate world for a couple of years. So I could not think of anything better to do than to combine my love of motorcycle touring and work experience at VIP Luggage than to set up a motorcycle touring accessories company, starting with luggage products. And now that that was decided in my mind, I had to come up with a brand name. One that captures the essence of what the company is being set up to do as well as being universal to be used across a wider range of products that I wanted to develop over the coming years. I was struggling with finding the right name, with several options getting dropped for being generic or corny or too niche. In between this whole name hunt, I was filling the days reading books, especially on history – which was also one of my optional subjects in the civil services exam. And watching my old movie collection. One day, I watched Kubrick's Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas. To fill in the gaps in the movie, I ended up on the internet reading more about Spartacus and the revolution he was part of. How the revolt ended was rather bloody—several thousand slaves were crucified along the most important of the Roman highways, the Appian Way, or Via Appia. That name struck me, and immediately I searched the Latin word for earth. And that was how the name ViaTerra came about.