Whenever I sit down with a new client for the first time, they usually don’t ask me about my experience, what I’ve done, or even where I went to school. The first question out of their mouth is always, “Where did you come up with Broken Peanut Media?” I always laugh and ask them if they have trouble remembering it, or if it offended them in anyway. The answer is always “No”, so I figure it has helped me more times than it has hurt me. I only ask these two questions because several people advised me against such a name when I started my company.
However, my company name serves a greater importance than most people know. It honors my older brother Jeremy “Peanut” Wethington. I am the youngest of three children born to a middle class family in Houston, Texas. My parents, Steve and Nancy, and my older sister, Amanda, all still live in Houston. I left Houston to attend college in Dallas, Texas where I fell in love with the atmosphere, the weather, and the idea of starting my own life and my business here.
While in high school my brother decided to shave his head one summer. With the average temperature in Houston being between 97 degrees and unbearable no one would blame a guy for doing this. After shaving his head though, his friends quickly decided that he had a “Peanut” shaped head and started to call him Peanut to give him a hard time. My brother being the easy going guy he was just laughed at it and took the name with pride. He even put it on his name tag at the McDonalds he worked at and started signing his name that way. He wasn’t going to let his friends get one over on him.
My family even started calling him Peanut on occasion. We were always close to each other but the sudden death of Jeremy in May of 1998 only made us closer. Jeremy was only eighteen when he died in a freak accident on a jet ski. I was thirteen at the time but it is something that has stayed with me in so many ways.
When it came time to think of a company name I didn’t want something boring like Joshua Wethington Productions. I wanted something different. Something unique. Something that was “outside of the box.” It was then I thought: Why not something out of the shell? I wrote Broken Peanut Media on my paper of ideas and stopped there. It was just perfect in so many ways. It was personal to me, it was different from all the rest, and it made me business card stand out. Or maybe it was the bright orange background? Either way it’s here to stay.
Joshua Wethington
Owner
Broken Peanut Media
