Your name is the word that will be said most often about your company: in every call, every recommendation, every invoice, every Google search. And yet it's usually decided over dinner, between three options someone thought of the night before. Changing it later costs a full brand renovation. It's worth getting right the first time.
What a good name has to deliver
- Strategic — it tells (or at least doesn't contradict) the brand's positioning. Naming a law firm is not the same as naming an ice cream shop.
- Pronounceable in your markets — if you sell to Germans and Brits, your name has to survive their accents. Run the phone test: say it out loud and have someone write it down.
- Distinctive — if it sounds like your sector's three competitors, you've bought confusion. Descriptive names ("Integral Services of...") are the most forgettable.
- Legally available — registrable as a trademark in your classes and territories. This filter eliminates more candidates than any other.
- Available digitally — a reasonable domain and coherent social handles. You don't need the exact .com, but you do need a dignified combination.
The routes for creating names
A professional process explores several routes at once: descriptive (they say what you do: clear but hard to register and differentiate), suggestive (they evoke the benefit without describing it — usually the sweet spot), abstract (invented words: maximum registrability, need more investment in awareness), origin-based (places, founders, house stories — they work beautifully in hospitality and local products). Each route yields dozens of candidates; the filtering is 80% of the work.
The process we follow (and why)
1. Strategic briefing — positioning, audience, markets, tone. The name is judged against these criteria, not personal taste.
2. Generation — hundreds of candidates across every route. Nothing gets discarded at this stage.
3. Successive filters — linguistic (pronunciation, connotations in other languages: false friends have sunk entire launches), competitive (distance from the sector) and preliminary legal.
4. Verification — trademark precedent, domains and social handles for the 3-5 finalists.
5. Decision — an argued presentation: each finalist with its story, its possible visual territory and its risks.
Mistakes we see on repeat
Choosing by vote (consensus produces lukewarm names); falling in love with a name before checking it legally; names that box you in ("Pizzeria X" when in two years you'll sell more than pizza); and discarding a good name because "the .com is taken" when the business is local.
A name doesn't work alone
A good name without an identity behind it is a licence plate. Naming is the first piece of the brand system: the visual identity, the tone and the story are what load it with meaning. That's why we work on them together — and why well-chosen names look inevitable five years on.
Need to name a company, a product or a hotel? Tell us about the project and we'll explain how we'd approach it.
