Create The Best Brand Name

Naming a brand can feel super high stakes and scary.

Your company name is everywhere — in your URL, on your stickers, on your packaging, your social media handles. A strong name can’t fix a bad product, but it can be something really special and meaningful that starts a valuable dialogue and relationship with your customers and community members. A company name may or may not describe what the company does, but it always says something about what your company believes, how it behaves, and what its values are.

Naming is about instinct and gut feeling as much as it is about logic and boundaries. When you do fall in love, you fall hard, and you might get your heart broken. Maybe the URL you wanted is taken, the trademark isn’t available, or there’s an awkward or inappropriate connotation you missed. Even when you find the perfect name for your brand, it won’t make everyone happy. It takes conviction and bravery to make the final choice.

Hopefully, we can help you name your brand successfully by sharing the detailed process we used to name Arq.

Rather than brainstorm blindly, we first answered a host of foundational questions about what this thing-yet-to-be-named was:

– What’s the offering?

– Who’s it for?

– What’s the history or context?

– What’s distinctive about this idea?

– What’s the personality of this brand? How should it make people feel?

– What are the overall objectives?

– What are the creative criteria?

We found the The Brand Strategy Canvas to be incredibly helpful in guiding us through these questions, and, once completed, it served as a helpful resource to share with the people whom we recruited to help us brainstorm our company name.

The fact is, these are essential strategic questions you should be able to answer before launching your brand anyway!

First, we collected enough notes and best practices on the naming process itself to create our own Frankenstein plan that matched our needs, style, and budget.

Here are a few of the most actionable articles we found:

– The StartUp podcast’s episode “How to Name Your Company” was tactical and unabashed about how tricky naming can be

– Designer Ben Pieratt’s 3-step process for naming a project or product is pure and simple, and he includes a list of helpful tools like Rhymezone (“like a drunk cousin reading the dictionary, it often yields connections you wouldn’t see elsewhere”)

– Emily Heyward, co-founder of Red Antler, a favorite branding agency of tech startups like Casper, Snow, and Allbirds, shared a step-by-step brainstorming agenda with Entrepreneur magazine

We also researched specific names to be inspired by, or to shy away from.

We loved elegant, short names like Saturdays and Hatch, as well as literal brand names like Mother Mag. We liked some multi-word names, such as Need Supply, Band of Outsiders, and St. Frank. We wanted to avoid Yiddish or Hebrew names, since one of our core values is inclusivity and not everyone who wants to connect with our brand or join our community speaks those languages.

This is when we called in the reserves.

First, we built our dream team of name brainstormers. We reached out to designers, branding professionals, entrepreneurs, pun masters, and enviably stylish people. They represented the community we wanted to build and the aesthetic we aimed to cultivate, and they also had relevant skillsets and diverse backgrounds (we didn’t want to get stuck in an echo chamber!).

Once we had assembled our crack team, we scheduled two separate, but identical brainstorming workshops of about a dozen people each. We took them really seriously – we didn’t want to waste our participants’ time or come up empty handed!

Based on the research we did about naming and advice from friends who do this work for a living, we created an agenda for our brainstorming sessions. We also ordered an unnecessary amount of Thai food and provided ample libations to create a warm, comfortable environment to to get everyone’s ideas flowing.

Our brainstorm sessions yielded hundreds of name possibilities!

Narrowing down the number of name possibilities was a daunting and time-consuming task.

To make our massive list of contenders more manageable, we manually organized the names into 14 categories that naturally emerged when looking at the full selection, including “Letters & Numbers” and “Heritage / Identity / Culture / History” (a theme that we utilized in our brainstorming sessions to get people’s juices flowing). We used a basic spreadsheet – we ended up with 14 columns (one for each category of name) and one name per row. This tedious but thorough process helped us find duplicates or overlapping words worth combining and helped us to see themes within each category.

Next, we did a quick and dirty review of the full, categorized list and knocked out definite nos. This process was largely gut-driven, but we also relied on our objectives and creative criteria (see the agenda in the section above if you don’t know what we’re talking about!) to guide us. We quickly cut our original list of names in half, purely based on instinct and common sense.

We did one final scan of the remaining names and made a list of 50 of our favorites. Building off of that list, we did one more name brainstorm on our own and then picked 25 final options to share with a small, hand-picked group of people for feedback.

Remember: everyone will have an opinion about the name you pick for your brand, and you can’t please them all!

We were curious what people’s first impressions would be of our top picks, and we wondered if they’d have new suggestions that didn’t come up during the local brainstorming sessions. We sent a simple survey to the people in this group and asked them to select their top 3 favorite names from our final list and to suggest any others that came to mind.

How did we know Arq was the right name for us after all? How will you know when you’ve landed on “the one?”

The right name will:

– Align with your project or product’s vision, mission, and strategy

– Have the right meaning or connotation

– Look good and be easy to remember and spell

– Be unique and available

We reviewed our list of 25 name finalists, considered the feedback we got, and kept in mind the considerations above. Arq won!

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: a detailed description of our branding process, from the visual identity and logo to the designing of our newsletter, The Ish, and our website.

Special thanks to Amanda Goldwasser, a close friend of Arq and our branding and naming guru!