We liked the idea of having a personal space filled with things you have collected over time. A place that makes complete sense to you, even if nobody else quite understands why you are keeping half of the things inside it.
That felt surprisingly similar to bookmarks.
People gradually collect hundreds, sometimes thousands, of links. Work tools, research, articles, videos, shops, hobbies, projects, references and all sorts of things they want to keep around.
In a way, your bookmark collection becomes its own digital cave.
A Cave Full of Links
That idea fit what we were trying to build.
We did not want Caves of Wonders to feel like another generic Chrome bookmark manager where everything eventually disappears into an increasingly complicated tree of folders.
We wanted it to feel more like a personal space.
Somewhere you could collect links, organize them the way you wanted, customize how everything looked and gradually build something that reflected the way you actually use the internet.
The more we thought about that idea, the more the cave metaphor started to make sense.
But a cave on its own was not enough.
The interesting part was what people were putting inside it.
The Wonderful Things Behind the Links
A bookmark is only a URL.
What makes it valuable is what is waiting on the other side.
It might be an incredibly useful tool.
A piece of research you spent hours finding.
A website you visit every day.
A video you want to keep.
A design reference.
A strange little corner of the internet that hardly anybody else knows about.
Those are the things that actually matter.
So instead of thinking about bookmarks simply as stored links, we started thinking about them as entrances to all of the useful, interesting and wonderful things people discover online.
That is where Caves of Wonders came from.
A personal cave filled with links to wonderful things.
And Then We Realized It Was CoW
Once we had Caves of Wonders, somebody inevitably shortened it.
Caves of Wonders.
CoW.
That made us laugh.
And once we noticed it, there was really no going back.
The acronym was short, memorable and just foolish enough to fit the kind of brand we wanted to build.
We never wanted Caves of Wonders to take itself too seriously.
We care about building a genuinely useful bookmark manager, but at the end of the day we are still talking about software for organizing links.
Calling it CoW immediately gave the product a little more personality.
It also created another fairly obvious opportunity.
Enter Captain Moosalot
If your product happens to be called CoW, introducing a bull becomes surprisingly easy.
That is how Captain Moosalot eventually became part of the Caves of Wonders world.
We wanted him to reflect the same tone as the name itself.
He takes himself extremely seriously.
He considers himself a captain, explorer, craftsman and expert on matters that probably do not require quite that level of authority.
At the same time, he is cheeky, foolish and occasionally completely ridiculous.
That contrast is intentional.
We wanted a character who would let us have fun with the brand without turning the product itself into a joke.
Caves of Wonders can take good design, bookmark organization, customization and privacy seriously while Captain Moosalot takes absolutely everything else far too seriously.
Giving the Captain a Modern Life
Once Captain Moosalot became part of the brand, we did not want him to feel like a traditional pirate character frozen somewhere in the eighteenth century.
So we started giving him a more modern personality and biography.
He encounters technology, internet culture and the same everyday nonsense the rest of us deal with.
We deliberately mix old pirate mythology with modern life because that contradiction fits him.
If you want to know more about the Captain, his increasingly questionable biography lives on the Caves of Wonders website.
None of it is necessary to use the extension.
It is simply there for anyone who wants to wander a little deeper into the cave.
How the Name Shaped the Product
What we like most about the name is that it ended up describing the product better than we originally expected.
A bookmark manager is ultimately a collection of entrances.
Each link takes you somewhere.
Over time, those links become a personal collection of useful tools, discoveries, references and things worth keeping.
Caves of Wonders gives you somewhere to organize all of them.
The man cave gave us the idea of a personal space.
The things behind the links gave us the wonders.
Together they became Caves of Wonders.
And then, almost accidentally, we got CoW.
At that point, Captain Moosalot was probably inevitable.
Explore your collection
Give your useful links a place of their own
Caves of Wonders helps you organize the places, tools and discoveries you want to keep around.
Visit Caves of Wonders ↗