Caitlin Barrett is a naming expert and brand-language strategist. They lead Wild Geese Studio, a full-service naming studio specializing in name development, naming operations, and evaluation. They also run Naming for Everyone, a naming-education platform that teaches brand, marketing, and creative professionals the fundamentals of brand naming. Caitlin lives in Kerhonkson, NY, where they train in jiu-jitsu, lift weights, and host Big Names in Naming, a podcast where they interview fellow namers.
Beautiful. Caitlin, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.
Thank you so much for having me.
I start all these conversations with the same question, a question I borrowed from a friend who helps people tell their stories. It’s a big question—so big that I like to over-explain it before asking. But before I do, I want you to know that you’re in complete control. You can answer it—or not answer it—in any way that feels right to you. The question is: Where do you come from?
I've listened to a couple episodes of your podcast. And as you ask it, I feel the buildup of this question. And I thought, how am I going to answer this? And I will do what a lot of people do and tell you I am from Los Angeles. I grew up there. And I think in terms of my understanding of myself and everything I've done since then, growing up there didn't feel like a place that I belonged to.
I've spent my whole adult life figuring out where do I belong and what makes me feel like me. And it's a very funny contrast to the person I was, I think, growing up in L.A. And I don't want to touch it about L.A. right now, given things. And it is my it is my home and all of that. So it's very funny to be talking about L.A. right now while it's on fire. But, yeah, I my whole journey of my life has been like, what is home and where do I feel like me? And, you know, I am talking to you from Kerhonkson, New York.
And you are also upstate here always and like feeling like in the last seven years that I've been here, like, this is home and this is who I am. And I've been able to find myself very, very far from the place I grew up and the types of people I grew up around. So, yeah, I think I think it's helpful for people figuring out kind of who I am and where I'm grounded to know that it's very far from there.
Do you have recollections of what you wanted to be as a child when you grew up?
Yeah, I loved digging. I loved mud and dirt and worms. I loved worms, still love worms.
When I see a worm, you know, I always like flick it back into the mud if it's getting dried out. And yeah, I thought a lot about being like an archaeologist when I was a little kid, just because I like digging so much. You know, it was Indiana Jones time. And then as I got a little older, I really, really, really wanted to be in the music industry. So that was kind of me thinking like, oh, maybe L.A. like I really wanted to be an A&R representative as like an eight year old. I knew about that job and I thought, oh, my God, you sit in an office and you listen to music and you decide what's good and you pick bands.
And yeah, that was like my drive for a really long time. And now I don't know anything about music.
What was your idea of an A&R person? What was your idea?
So my dad was in the music industry. So I actually had like a really clear idea of what what A&R was like he for a while worked in the music business management so they would get stacks and stacks of CDs. I think every Friday and when I had my weekends with him, like I would just go to my room and just listen to every single album that I could. And I always knew about cool music that was coming out before other little kids who did not care. I can't tell you how little you can impress other eight and nine year olds with knowing about what's going to be on K-rock for everyone else. But I was really into it.
I really identify with that idea of just trying to impress people with things that they're not interested in. That feels like a familiar experience, I think. So tell me about Kerhonkson. How did you end up there? Tell me a little bit about where you are now, what you're doing. And I'm curious about how you came to be in Kerhonkson.
Yeah, I came to be in Kerhonkson incredibly randomly. You know, I was ready to leave Brooklyn. I'd been in Brooklyn for 16 years before I came here. And I was very, very burned out on Brooklyn, which I think is something a lot of people can relate to. I'd never felt like New York was my home either. I kind of ended up there, or Brooklyn, very randomly.Just kind of ended up there and kept doing okay. I had work, I had an apartment, and had enough professional success that it didn't make sense to leave. But I wasn't happy there. And so when I was really, really unhappy, I would grab a place to stay upstate for the weekend and decompress.
I would go to Woodstock, I would go to Kingston, I would go to Hudson. And eventually I had a breaking point, someone broke into my house while I was sleeping, and I had the fortunate, I guess, thing of discovering like, what do you do when something really bad happens and someone breaks into your home and you're sleeping naked?I jumped out of bed and chased her out of my home. I think ultimately it was a woman who had been up all night on drugs, very fine motor skills, picking my luck at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. But it was like a wake-up call. I was like, I don't want to live here anymore. I don't want to do this. I don't want to live in this tiny studio.
It cost so much money to look out over a restaurant's HVAC system for what? This isn't good. So I'm really thankful to that woman because the next day I called someone who knew a broker up here.
Very long story short, I would have lived anywhere like Westchester to Montreal, Massachusetts border, like all the way out to like Oneonta. Didn't care. I just wanted to be somewhere.
I could look at trees and the broker I ended up working with lives diagonally across the street from me. Now I sort of, I would say it was his favorite. He wanted me to live within like viewing distance of his home. But he was great. And I just ended up here because he talked to his neighbor who was like, I have a farmhouse with a lot of problems that I don't want to have to do a lot of renovations on to put on the market. And he was like, I know the idiot for you. They're going to fit right in. And it's my dream house. I love it here. And this community is great. And I've met a lot of amazing people since being here. And I think it's my forever home.
What have you discovered in that? It's such a big shift from Brooklyn upstate. What have you discovered in that process?
I need quiet. I thrive with like a lot of quiet. I like to do things. I'm a doer. I, you know, I'm going all day, but my surroundings need to be a lot more chill. I like spending time with people in homes and doing projects and not having my whole social life take place in bars and restaurants and clubs and going out. I think that was never me. And I tried really, really hard to make it me. and it wore me out. So this is my pace and these are my people.
Tell me a little bit about your work. How did you, when did you first discover, well tell me a little bit about your work and what you're doing then.
Yeah I am a professional namer. I name brands, companies, products, services, technologies, really a whole bunch of things. I always say you name it, I've named it, hahaha. But I've been doing this for almost 20 years. I started as a copywriter at Martha Stewart, I think in 2005 maybe, I think coming up on 20 years of it, maybe it was 2006. But yeah, I started naming the scented candles there and had no idea then that this would be a lifelong career.
So now I run a naming studio called Wild Geese Studio. I do more like complex naming projects for enterprise technology brands, other brands too. And then I teach naming through a project I called Naming for Everyone and I teach naming skills to sort of that 22 year old version of me that was told to name things and given no framework for how to do it or how to navigate some of the legal stuff that came with it. So it's sort of my way of doing some repair to a lot of that stress I had earlier in my career.
Yeah I can imagine, I mean I watch the, I mean it's relevant, I get you know the Martha Stewart documentary. Can you tell me a story about that 20, because you're very explicit about your intention with what you're doing in naming and talking to your 22 year old self. Can you tell a story about a scented candle and the naming pass?
Oh my god, yes. So I was, I was very young and when I arrived there, people on my team were incredible. They're still some of my favorite people on earth but they were like, you're the baby, these candles don't smell so good. Here you go, here's a table with a blanket on it and underneath it were these little pots from you know the vendor that supplied the scented candle stuff and they weren't colored or anything so you just had to like come up with scent names and that was gonna drive you know what the whole brand of these candles would be and they smelled so bad and I at the time was like not very honest with myself about how severe a lot of my allergies were to just smell and suffer and smell and suffer and write down a couple dozen names.
I mean first I would probably write down like five names and then I had to get into the rhythm with our legal counsel on reviewing them and she would tell me none of them would work. You know, Glade has a registration for you know everything related to strawberry and I'm like no but it smells like strawberry so we would just go through endless rounds of trying to figure out names for these things you know and they're pretty descriptive names but we had to go through a lot because Martha's Martha and we don't want Martha infringing on other people's stuff. So it was, I remember it being really stressful but really liking when I finally got things that stuck. It was a better feeling than you know my headlines making it into ads and things like that. It just didn't light up my brain quite as much.
Yeah and what happened then like so you discovered that you could make a living naming how did you end up with your own studio?
I spent about a decade in agency life. I worked for a smaller agency called Ology out of Columbus, Ohio and then I moved to Interbrand which is a really really big brand strategy firm and through a lot of luck I think I ended up becoming the head of the naming practice there and I got to work with other namers around the whole world and a lot of those people were now part of an independent network of global namers just because that experience was so special of getting to help each other with work and work through like complex you know understanding of different terms and different regions and so I was at Interbrand until about the end of 2015 started 2016 and then just got out of there started my own thing which is a path that I'm really happy I worked at Interbrand so much but that big agency world is a it's a tough one I would never go back.
Yeah what do you love about it? What do you love about naming? Where's the joy in it for you?
It’s because it’s everything. I think a lot of times, people are surprised at how much I know about brand strategy, business strategy, and how decisions are made—like what boards need to make a choice. I don’t just sit down and generate names, though that’s the best part, I won’t lie. If I get to spend four or eight hours in a library with a stack of books, coming up with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of name ideas in a day, I’m a naming machine. What a joy.
But you get to do everything. People will come to you with a naming request at very different moments in their business. Maybe the business is just being born, and you’re helping them figure out, ‘Who are you now? Who do you think you’re going to be?’ When we start to try on names, we really figure out who they are. A lot of that clarity doesn’t come until they see name ideas and go, ‘Oh, if we go with something like Hearthside, we’re cozy and warm. If we go with something like Hammock, we’re outside and breezy.’
Maybe their original idea was just, ‘Yeah, we’re easy, breezy, comfortable,’ but as we try things on, we discover they’re different than they thought. It’s a fascinating process. And yeah, I just love decision-making. I love watching people make decisions and helping them make brave choices. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen once the name is out in the world—I don’t know either. But figuring out what we need to do to make a good choice together? It’s really fun.
Yeah, when you say that it’s everything, I kind of want to unpack that a little bit—like, why do you think that is? Why is it that all these disciplines come together around the word we use to call things?
Naming is so poorly understood. There’s either this attitude of, ‘It’s just a name, who cares?’—until we need a name, and then suddenly it is everything. Like, ‘Well, our design is going in this direction, so the name needs to do this.’ It’s not the central force of everything, but everything we want to be—and won’t be—rests on that decision. So everything comes into play: How is engineering going to handle this in the product? How is marketing going to sell this? Are those even aligned? How do we wrestle with what’s important and what’s not, especially in the face of so many unknowns—like when the product isn’t even in the market yet, and no one knows it?
More people than they realize end up coming to the table with their own needs and expectations for the name. We all just sort of look at it together and see what we can make of it. It can be really fun—or really frustrating. I’ve been doing this long enough that I don’t take on as much of other people’s frustrations anymore, but I still feel for it. I see how frustrating it is when people’s goals for the name are totally different, depending on their investment in the project so far and what their investment will be going forward.
So yeah, how do you even define the job? It’s not as simple as just naming something. What do people misunderstand about what it really means to be a namer, and what it takes to name something—I think my mentor and old boss, Rachel Bernard, put it really well recently. I’m going to butcher what she said, but it was something like: The job of naming feels so much like failing.
You absorb so much of other people’s insecurities about what’s unknown and what they want to be known throughout the process. And it is a lot of that. Marketing wants to talk about how cool the thing is going to feel, what it’s going to do for you. Engineering wants to talk about how cool the underlying technology is, how it works. They’ve poured their heart and soul into developing this thing.
That’s where the tension comes up, and there you are—kind of absorbing the inability to reconcile those goals. They’re two very different perspectives. Sure, you can develop names on two tracks, doing a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. But is there going to be some magic name that makes both parties feel fully heard? Not necessarily. That’s where you have to be okay with the feeling of kind of failing throughout the process. Hopefully, you get to an answer in the end, but someone is probably going to be a little mad at you at some point.
The key is building up the process, the frameworks, and the skills—those nerdy things that help you withstand that tension and still make progress. It’s about advancing the decision-making a little bit in every meeting, even if you don’t land on the final answer that day.
And when people come to you, why do they come to you? I’ve always wondered. In my experience, when someone asks about a name, they’re often really talking about a whole bunch of other structural issues. It’s like naming is a proxy for something bigger. So when people ask for your help, what are they really asking for? What kinds of conversations happen?
A lot of the time, people come to me when it’s already an emergency. Usually, one of two things has happened: either they’ve tried to name it on their own and gotten nowhere because they haven’t gone through the process of figuring out what job they want the name to do or what about the name will be really important to their target audience, so they’re stuck, unable to make a decision, and time is running out. Or, they have made a decision—something they love, everyone’s bought in, it’s beautiful—and then they take it to a trademark attorney who says, “Absolutely not, this name is very high-risk, and you can’t register it.”
Sometimes, they’ve discovered, often by chance rather than through investing in the right process, that the name means something really bad in another language—cue the linguistic disaster. So, I come in at a pretty hard starting point, often with a little trauma and distrust of the naming process. They’re thinking, “We did this already, it was going so well, and then it fell apart.” But I still need to start from scratch. I still need all the good foundational stuff. By then, people are exhausted, thinking, “We have to do this again?” So, we try to make progress quickly. But yeah, most of the time, I’m stepping in when there’s trouble.
Every now and then—maybe once a year—I’ll get a dream client. They’re usually repeat clients or people who know it’s best to work with an expert. They come prepared with process and resources to get to a naming strategy quickly, and we’ll do all the due diligence necessary to match their risk profile. But usually, it’s a more dire situation.
That’s amazing. I feel like when I think about what I do—qualitative research, listening, interviewing—it’s such an invisible skill. People watch me work, and it just looks like I’m talking to somebody, so there’s this assumption that it’s something anybody can do. And I think naming is the same way—people imagine they can just do it themselves, and then they end up in crisis.
Yes, very similar. And actually, bringing up listening—it’s the number one skill in naming. Listening in relationships, really hearing people out, spending enough time listening at the start of a project—that’s where you hear so much that influences more creative, interesting naming choices. Those insights can help people be braver later on. But if you just dive right in and start making names, you miss a lot. Everyone thinks they can name, just like everyone thinks they can write or listen. But these are things that are often done so much better by someone who’s been doing it a long time.
There’s a woman named Niobe Way—this is a bit of a non-sequitur—but she’s a sociologist who’s done a lot of studies on young boys in America. I saw her speak once, and she was advocating for people just talking to each other again, like in a "let’s learn how to socialize" kind of way. She suggested an icebreaker question you could always ask: What’s the story behind your first name? It’s such a good question because nobody ever asks that, but it gives people an opportunity to talk about themselves in a really interesting way.
It reminded me of naming projects, I’ve done a couple—not with the kind of experience or discipline you have—but it’s so vulnerable, like you said. Naming is everything. There’s something about names that makes people feel so exposed. So I guess my question is: How do you listen? What kind of relationship do you build? And what’s your method for creating a space where people feel they can explore that vulnerability?
Yeah, I mean, I was really lucky to have started at Interbrand. For a lot of us there, my old boss—again, Rachel Bernard, one of the best people in naming—made a big point about understanding the people you’re working with and how they’ll make sense of things. Like, are they coming from an MBA background? Those people love frameworks. If you came to Interbrand, you came to the right place—there was no shortage of frameworks. I still bring a lot of that to the table.
But other people are looking for something completely different, like out-of-the-blue creativity. They want to see those unexpected names. And then there are people who need the story that connects the name back to their identity or vision. Others care more about due diligence—they want to know that whatever we pick isn’t going to embarrass them down the line.
At the start of a project, I spend a lot of time talking to people about what they’re hoping for. What do they want the name to do for them? What do they want to hear in the same sentence as the name once it’s out in the world? What do they want people to say when they’re recommending it to others? That helps us imagine the kinds of conversations the name needs to be part of. We give it a job, and that job becomes something people can agree on. It also makes the conversation easier and less intimidating.
I try to avoid overly academic language. For example, namers might talk about whether a name should be evocative or a compound construct. I’d brief other namers that way, but using that language with clients often makes them feel insecure, like, I know my ambitions for the name, but I don’t know this academic terminology. Forcing people to speak that way just puts up walls, so I’ve moved away from that over time.
Instead, I focus on understanding what they’re looking for, how they’ll make decisions, and the group dynamics at play. That’s one of the most important things. Very rarely do I work with just one or two decision-makers. It’s usually a big group, so I ask upfront, How do you make choices together? Then, I observe and get a sense of any tension or dynamics.
I think about what they’ll need to see—whether in the name itself or the story around it—to feel like there’s something for them. Sometimes that takes extra work, but it’s worth it
What’s the state of naming now? Are there trends, fads, or styles? Or are we in an era of any kind?
I’m probably the worst person to ask about that. There are so many people who do a much better job assessing current trends. For example, there’s an agency called Tanj, run by Scott Milano—another former Interbrander. I think he does a great job of tracking naming trends.
My perspective is more about what’s going on with namers themselves. I put out a survey every year—well, this is only the second year, but I’m committing to doing it annually! Two years in means it’s officially every year, right? This year, I got 56 responses, which is amazing because two years ago, I don’t think I even knew 56 namers to send it to.
The survey asks things like: How was your business last year? What do you think is going on in the field? How optimistic are you about the future of our profession? The results were a mixed bag—and probably more mixed than in the past. Business was weird last year, not just for namers but for a lot of people, especially those working independently. Some had a real roller-coaster year.
Looking ahead, some think 2025 might be similar. The outlook for naming as a career is mixed too. Many people are optimistic, but we’re all pretty sure it’s going to change. AI is definitely shifting expectations. I don’t think AI has fundamentally changed naming yet, at least not with the tools I’ve seen. I haven’t used AI in a way where I thought, Wow, this is so good that everyone should fire me. But that fear exists, and I’ve already lost work to it.
For example, I put together a proposal for a really big company—like, big big—and the person I was working with shared that someone else in their organization said, Why would we hire someone to do something ChatGPT can do? Okay, probably not a client I would’ve loved working with anyway, but it’s not something I would’ve heard three years ago.
Things are definitely changing. Expectations around speed and pricing are shifting, but the core of the work—helping people understand what kind of name to develop, what qualities it should have, and all the strategic stuff—is still very much needed.
Plus, there’s the practical side of naming: having enough viable options to get through all the due diligence required. That includes trademark issues, potential linguistic problems, and all the complexities between liking a name and actually being able to use it. Those are areas where I think namers still have a lot of value to offer. It’s helpful to have experts guide people through those challenges because they can get really complex.
I feel like we’re very much in the same boat in this conversation about expectations and generative AI. I love how you describe your experience with these tools. I’ve felt the same—like, they must be using something else if they’re getting those kinds of results. Two things are bouncing around in my head. First, how do you make the case for what you do against ChatGPT to someone who says, Why not just use that? Or do you just let them go? Maybe they’re not your client anyway. Second, you mentioned that names have jobs and that there are different kinds of names. Could you talk more about that? Is figuring out the type of name part of your process?
For the first part, the easy answer is I let them go. There are always going to be clients who want help with naming but only in a super quick, bang-out-a-bunch-of-ideas kind of way. That’s fine—they don’t need me.
One of my first questions during the proposal stage is, Why do you need help? What kind of help are you looking for? If it’s clear they just want a half-hour conversation or a quick list of ideas, I’ll often just talk to them briefly and let that be the end of it. We don’t need to work together, and that’s okay.
As for the second part—different kinds of names—I always start projects by establishing some “beacons.” I call them beacon names. These are names that give us direction, and I try to drive clients toward more interesting beacons for their category.
For example, I have a cosmetics client I work with frequently. They’re very open to phrasal names—two, three, even four words—and we have a really clear sense of what a good, on-brand name looks like for them. It’s a dream because trademark clearance rates on those longer, unexpected, slightly playful names are so much better. If I screen 100 names, 60 or 70 might come back without major issues, and we can filter from there.
But let’s say, at the start of a project, everyone’s looking for a name that’s like… well, beacon. You hear the same kinds of names over and over—tapestry, mosaic, lighthouse, apex, vertex, the names of Greek gods, constellations. We’ve been recycling these names for decades, and it’s a challenge.
In those cases, I might say, Okay, let’s talk to your legal team. Is there a brave approach we can take? Maybe we look for ways to combine familiar names with unique descriptors—like Horizon Estate Planning. You’re not going to sue anyone else using Horizon because it’s just so ubiquitous, but that can be part of your strategy.
Usually, though, my clients are big enterprises, very risk-averse, and they don’t want to be seen as stepping on anyone’s toes. And I agree—they shouldn’t. So instead, we look at who’s doing interesting things in the space and ask, Could we be interesting like that?
Take Liquid Death, for example. It’s an insane name for water—it almost implies danger. Yet it works. It’s brave, it’s different, and it’s building its own story. That might not be the strategy for every client, but we can ask, What could that kind of bravery look like in your space? Could we go longer? Could we borrow from an unexpected place? Those choices often lead to higher trademark clearance rates, which is a good indicator that we’re getting to names that are unique and ownable.
On the other hand, if you go with something like Horizon, you’re signaling, We don’t have anything too different to say about ourselves. And that’s fine—sometimes it’s the truth. But if that’s not the truth, we have to dig deeper and go further to find the name that really fits.
And the idea that names have jobs to do—that’s central to naming, right? But it’s not something people often think about. How do you work that into your process?
Sometimes I just ask because it’s a question people can answer. I usually give a few examples to help them think about it. For instance, do we want a name that educates? That could be something like Microsoft Teams—it immediately tells us that teams are going to come together. Or maybe they want to be disruptive, which might lead to a name like Discord—something with a bit of abrasion.
If they say they want to be disruptive, we then ask, How are people going to experience that disruption? That’s a very different conversation than if they want to educate, where we’d explore grounding vocabulary that helps people understand what the name represents or does.
One of my favorite tips for people trying to name something on their own is to ask: What job do I want this name to do? Do you want it to delight people? Then maybe the name tells a joke, feels light-hearted, or even sounds like a children’s book. Do you want it to motivate people? Then perhaps it becomes a call-to-action type of name. These questions lead to totally different paths and are incredibly helpful for organizing the process early on.
Yeah, that makes sense. What role, if any, does research play in your process? You’ve talked about listening—so where, who, and how do you listen and learn.
It really depends on where we are in the process. Sometimes I come in early and handle the brand strategy, so I’ve been working with stakeholders and maybe even done audience research. Other times, I join when the thing—whether it’s a product or a company—already has its core materials, like a value proposition, brand strategy, or positioning statement.
When that’s the case, I like to see everything. If there’s audience research, I want to spend time with it. If there’s audience conversation—whether it’s interviews, surveys, or transcripts—I want to dive into that too. Often, you can find really interesting insights in the audience’s own voice, which can inspire creative territories for naming or even specific name ideas. Understanding who’s going to use the name and how they’re going to say it is foundational.
On the back end, research comes into play with linguistic checks to ensure the name doesn’t offend or is impossible to pronounce in key markets. Sometimes we go deeper, conducting in-depth linguistic research or richer validation studies. But validation research isn’t just about asking, Which name is the best? It’s about exploring names from different angles to understand how they perform in various contexts.
For me, research is most valuable at the beginning—understanding the possibilities and setting the foundation. At the end, it’s about ensuring we’ve made a good choice. I also love bringing in unexpected inspiration—like, if the brand wants to be about fun, maybe we’ll look at how Vegas clubs are named and see if that inspires something totally different for, say, a granola brand. It’s about tying those unexpected ideas back to core themes and the name’s job.
And what about validation work on the back end? When a client says, We need to do some validation on this, what kind of direction do you give?
It depends on what they’re looking for with validation. Sometimes, clients just want reassurance, which might mean simple testing like, Does this name resonate with our audience? or Is it easy to spell, say, and remember? That’s straightforward and can be done through surveys or small focus groups.
But I encourage clients to go deeper. For example, if we’re testing multiple names, I’ll suggest we explore more than just preference. We might ask questions like, What assumptions does this name create? or How does it make you feel about the product or brand? Those insights are far more useful than just knowing which name people “like.”
I also stress that validation shouldn’t be about picking the “safest” name. The safest choice is rarely the most interesting or memorable. Instead, validation should help the client understand which names are worth betting on and why. It’s about framing the results in a way that encourages brave but informed decision-making.
I like to start by asking, Why do we want to do this? Are we doing validation just because someone needs to see that it’s been done? If that’s the case, I’m less excited about it. But when the goal is to genuinely understand more about a name or the names we’re considering, I love it.
It’s often pretty basic stuff—like asking, What are your spontaneous associations with this word? or What would you expect of this name? Then we might dig into the jobs we’ve asked the name to do. For example, if we’re comparing a couple of names, we could ask, Which one educates you about X? That helps us show we’ve done the work we set out to do, but it also reveals gaps.
Maybe a name delights people, but it doesn’t convey, This is delicious. That insight tells us we need to find other ways to communicate that message. Validation also serves as a “final disaster check.” It can unearth unexpected associations—things no one thought of before. So, it’s helpful not just for confirming decisions but for identifying any remaining risks. Ultimately, it’s about understanding what the name helps us do and where we might need to fill in the gaps.
You mentioned Rachel Bernard as a mentor. Are there other mentors or touchstones that you return to during your process or projects?
I got so lucky in that regard, and it’s a big part of why I put Naming for Everyone together. So many people were so patient with me when I didn’t know anything. People like Amartha Stuart, Kelly Ruff, Janelle Asplen—still love them—Rachel Bernard, and Jason Baer, who’s now a partner at SYP. They were all incredibly smart, patient, and knowledgeable about working with clients, each with very different styles.
It meant the world to me that they invested so much time in me. I channel each of them probably weekly, and it’s been over a decade since I worked with any of them directly. When you’re early in your career, you don’t realize how important those relationships are going to be or how long they’ll stay with you. I still text Rachel almost every day.
I know a lot of people don’t feel that kind of connection in their work. Naming can be lonely—whether you’re independent or the sole naming expert on a central brand or marketing team. You might field dozens or even hundreds of naming requests a year, and it’s hard. Naming, like many creative jobs, benefits so much from collaboration and support. Without it, the work can feel isolating.
I feel lucky, too. I found a mentor early on, and even though I’m not in touch with him often, I’m constantly in dialogue with the ideas he planted in my head. I also love pointing out that “mentor” was originally a character in The Iliad. He’s the man Odysseus left his son with. Isn’t it amazing that the word is sitting right there in our culture? I remember when someone first pointed that out to me—it blew my mind. That brings me to this question: As you’ve spent more time in naming and gotten older, do you feel like naming has changed? Are you doing things differently now than how you were taught? And have you observed any evolution in the field?
In so many ways, naming has gotten harder, and it will continue to get harder every year. The main reason is the trademark landscape—it’s just more challenging now. The world is much more interconnected, which also increases the chances of someone who speaks a language you don’t speak encountering your name and being offended if it’s inappropriate.
Products get shipped everywhere, people travel, and, of course, with everything being digital, if your name means something goofy, people are going to find out. So, the importance of due diligence and linguistic checks grows every year.
But the frustration I hear about most is around trademarks. Everyone says it’s harder this year than last, and next year will be even worse. And secretly, I love it. I know it sounds psycho, but I genuinely love the hard parts of the process. When I hear, “We’re going to need six or seven thousand names for this global medical software project,” I’m like, “No problem, I’m in.” I know how much time it will take, how many people I’ll need to bring in, and I’m fine with it. It’s hard, and it will keep getting harder, but I enjoy that challenge.
As for how I’ve evolved, when I left Interbrand, I initially recreated their systems for my own independent work. Everything I did was really heavy-duty and slow. Over time, I realized it didn’t have to be that way. I’ve unlearned a lot of the processes I thought were mandatory for naming success.
Now, I keep things a bit more informal while still making sure the right information is shared at the right milestones. On my end, I have so much muscle memory for the steps in the process that everything runs more smoothly. I also work consistently with the same people—ones I know and trust—so we collaborate really effectively. Even though naming is getting harder, I feel like I’m becoming more efficient and effective every year.
Your face really did light up at the prospect of all those complications.
I know, it’s a sickness! I love getting work because it’s been too hard for someone else to tackle. It’s so fun for me because I usually have the system, the process, and the people to handle it.
Your interviews are amazing, and part of the fun is that you bring these beautiful exercises into the conversation. So, I thought I’d return the favor—do you have a dream project you’d like to name?
You know, I do combat sports and strength training, and I’ve never really gotten to work in those spaces. I was helping the owner of the jiu-jitsu gym where I train rename the gym. He got nervous at the last minute and ended up calling it Gambit, which is totally fitting for him because he’s a chess guy. But I really wanted to call it The Holding Company. In jiu-jitsu, we spend so much time holding each other. For a while, I thought it might be my favorite naming credit of all time.
I’m not mad at him for not picking it, but I’d love to do more naming in this space. I’ve been training and competing in strength sports for about 16 years now, and I’d love to work on projects in strongman, powerlifting, or jiu-jitsu. If anyone has challenges in those areas, I’d love to talk.
Is there a project or a name out there that you’re most proud of?
That’s such a great question, and it’s one people ask all the time, but I don’t have a perfect answer. There’s one project I love because it’s emotional for me. A former colleague and friend, Taylor Bruce, opened a bookstore in Austin. He’s just the coolest guy. He makes those Wildsam guides—if you’ve seen those travel books for places like Brooklyn, Austin, or even the Moon, they’re brilliant. He’s a beautiful writer, and he asked me to help name his bookstore in Austin, which is called First Light. It was meant to be a space that felt light, airy, open—a place for the community. That one is really special to me.
Another favorite is a coffee shop in Bushwick called Sey Coffee—spelled S-E-Y. I love to tell people there are two moments in a naming project when you might come up with the best answer: the first name or the last name you add to the list. Sey was the last name I added to the presentation. That morning, I’d seen the word yes in a mirror behind someone’s head. I did some quick trademark checking, added it to the list, and they picked it.
It didn’t fit the naming strategy we had worked on at all, but now, seven or eight years later, it’s such a perfect fit for them. They’ve brought it to life in a beautiful way, and I absolutely love that one.
I love that story because it breaks all the rules. One of the notes I had for our conversation was about the interplay between chaos and intuition—art and science. How do you balance those? What role does all of that play, and how do you manage it?
You have to make space for it. All the structured parts—the conversations, the high-volume name generation—they’re essential. But you also need room for the messy parts. The process should be messy; it should feel awful at times.
For example, the window next to me is covered in Post-its. I’ll fill a room with scrap paper when I’m brainstorming. I’m not organized during the idea generation phase, but I get very organized afterward. I also love looking at inspiration that’s completely unrelated to what I’m working on.
Sometimes, you stumble upon a name with a story that’s perfect, even if it doesn’t fit the strategy at all. I’ll screen those names, check them, and maybe present them in their own little moment. Those often end up being the winners.
Oh, I’ve got a little time. What was I going to say… Oh, yeah. Do you ever do a name-and-shame exercise? Is there a naming style you absolutely hate?
Oh my god, yes. If anyone wants to subscribe to my Substack, I have a series where I occasionally highlight names that are meant for “smart” businesses but look really, really dumb. One example is Knewz—spelled K-N-E-W-Z. I think it’s some kind of news service, but it looks awful, like a child wrote it with a big crayon in their fist.
There’s a new sober dating app called Lucid, but it’s spelled L-O-O-S-I-D. To me, it sounds goofy and unserious, which is not what you want for something that’s trying to position itself as a thoughtful, sober dating app. I don’t drink, but I wouldn’t want to be on an app like that because the name alone feels off-putting. I really dislike that type of coining, where a name gets dumbed down in a way that undermines the position it’s trying to claim in the market.
Yeah, well, it’s interesting because it points out how much the verbal and the visual dimensions of a name are connected. I geek out on this stuff—there’s this temptation to think of a name as just a word, but it’s clearly not. How do you think about those dimensions? Also—small tangent here—my whole thing is called The Business of Meaning. It’s a bit pretentious, obviously, but it resonates with me. What does meaning mean for you when it comes to naming? Because you’re working with meaning in its purest form, at the point of interaction. What is meaning to you?
Meaning is funny because it’s so personal. We love to think a name “means” the perfect thing. I’ll do it too—I’ll show up to a naming project and say, This name means X. But then people will respond, No, it doesn’t. It means Y. And what they’re often sharing is a personal association: That name feels slow to me, or That name feels ugly, or even, That name reminds me of someone who bullied me in high school.
Especially with names that aren’t yet attached to a product or company, people bring their own baggage to the table. If I said Google to you before Google existed, you might think, Baby talk, silly, goo-goo sounds. That’s not what the name means now, but initially, you’d associate it with those sounds.
We have to talk about meaning a lot during the naming process and work to separate people’s personal associations from what the average target audience might think. This is where research is invaluable. When someone in the room says, This name feels unserious, or It reminds me of my elementary school bully, we can say, Okay, let’s check in with your target audience. They might be right, or it might be something we can dismiss.
Meaning is a really funny and fascinating thing when it comes to names.
If there’s one name out there that you could fix, what would it be?
That’s such an interesting question.
Anthony once said something about bad names being a form of pollution—I’m paraphrasing, but it stuck with me. If you could fix one bad name, what would it be?
You know, it’s another name that breaks all the rules. Everything in my process—every tool, diagnostic, and service I offer—would have told Elon Musk not to name it X.
Ultimately, it’s not going to matter for him. He can withstand anything. But it’s the perfect example of changing a name when you didn’t have to and giving up on so much brand equity—if I can use a dorky branding term—that was incredibly valuable and really hard to build.
And for what? Essentially, ego. If I could fix one name, I’d bring back Twitter. I’d make it Twitter again because I miss it the way it was. That decision was a name crime on almost every level—from intellectual property to creativity to brand equity.
A real massacre.
Beautiful. Well, listen, it’s been so much fun talking to you. I really appreciate you joining me—thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
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