We get a lot of questions asking where the company name VINA came from, why we named it that, and why we call our social app Hey! VINA, so here’s the *FULL* history!

Four years ago, I haphazardly co-founded a women’s social club, and off the cuff, we named our first event Ladies Who Vino. Christina (my cofounder of the group) simply threw it on a Facebook event invite, and I loved it. I was like, “Ooh, it sounds like ladies who we know,” which is essentially what it was, but the primary activity was that we were drinking wine, and that name just stuck! On an average month, we bring together ~100 women at a wine bar somewhere in SF, and this became the foundation for the passion and inspiration behind VINA.

Fastforward a bit. Three-ish years later, I start thinking about building a platform to help women find friends anywhere…

When we were brainstorming, the name VINA came up as an iteration on Ladies Who Vino. It was pithy, didn’t have a whole lot of meaning in the US, and it had a lot of great feminine qualities to it – vines/connectedness, Venus, and wine. I liked it. But the really good reasons to name it vina were what I discovered after.

Vina is a Scottish girls name that means beloved or friend.

Vina also is the Icelandic word that means female friend.

And that’s simply perfection.

We hope vina becomes the word used around the world to represent someone who is in your network of women – she could be a friend, colleague, or mentor.

We hope vina becomes the word used around the world to represent someone who is in your network of women – she could be a friend, colleague, or mentor. It’s a word that more widely covers that special (platonic) bond between women, better and more inclusive than our usual “she’s my girlfriend.” And it allows us to return the word “girlfriend” to its original definition: a regular female companion with whom a person has a romantic or sexual relationship.

We can’t wait to help you meet new vinas, make new memories, and take new adventures with the infinite possibilities that lay ahead of you with on the Hey! VINA app.