This is a question that I get asked a lot! It is an unusual word, and something that has no obvious meaning, so I thought I would explain...
A lot of children have trouble saying certain words when they are learning to talk. The word 'yellow' is one that seems to stump most of us when we are discovering the colours of the spectrum. The most common pronunciation would be 'lellow', but this wasn't the one that I went for, it was varoshe!
When I was small, my Grandpa had a royal-blue Ford Escort, whereas my Dad had a bright-yellow Volkswagon Jetta. My description of the two cars was always, "Blue, Grandpa's car, varoshe, Daddy's car!" So it became a family description for the colour, yellow (especially the bright, Jetta yellow) was always called varoshe.
What was strange about my new name for the colour was that it didn't mean that it was my favourite. In fact when I was around four years old, I became completely intolerant of the colour, even to the point that I ended up changing the whole colour scheme of my second cousin's wedding. I was the flower girl and flatly refused to wear the beautiful pale yellow dress that had been chosen for me. Instead the wedding colours were changed and I ended up wearing a very sickly sweet peach coloured dress!
Varoshe is pronounced va-rosh. I decided to add the ‘e’ to the spelling when I first used it as my design name back in 2000. I simply preferred the way the word looked. After all it is my word so I got to choose how I wanted to spell it!
When I completed my degree and started my career as a jewellery designer my Dad bought me my first domain name, www.varoshe.com. This is the one that we still use today, and as an homage to the original meaning of Varoshe, I decided to add small details of yellow around our website. It just felt right and I thought it was important to remember the little girl, in the varoshe dungerees, who came up with our name all those years ago.
