A little secret here, I spent a good part of my professional career naming things. Products to be a little more precise, it was one of my super powers. Then along came me branching off on my own and I just made one mistake after the other. I am the epitome of the cobbler with no shoes. Take the name of this blog–Besotted. So, clever + charming if I lived in the UK where it’s part of the everyday vernacular, in the states? Not so much. Everyone else outside the UK? Forget about it. Do you know how many times I had to spell it? Repeat myself? Etc.? Imagine someone trying to remember it, let alone try to spell it to find it on Google? Mistakes were made.
Fast forward many years and the time had come to name our font foundry. Since we had been working on it for nearly four years, you’d think this would have been the first thing we did, we didn’t. It was almost like those people that like to wait for their child to be born before naming them, we wanted to make sure the name ‘fit’. Michelle and I made a conscious effort to make the name very, very easy to spell and remember. Of course, the name couldn’t just be easy, it would be great if it had meaning to us as well. So we did what any successful branding studio would do, we spent a marathon texting session throwing out names. We knew that we wanted a word that described how unique the foundry was going to be, ‘unique’, was definitely never an option. We settled on rare. The bird bit? Oh, my so much meaning rolled into that one! We are a rare woman owned font foundry, the majority of foundries of this caliber are male owned. ‘Bird’ in the UK (a little Anglophile nod) is slang for woman. Rare Bird together means ‘something or someone that is quite different and remarkable‘. Yes, please. And we quite like birds around here. There are bird names in both our families (and of course in our partners’ existing font foundry) and what’s not to like about an animal that can soar? Nothing my friends, nothing wrong with that. Once we found a name we like we did all the requisite research of making sure the URL was available, etc. This is so important, there’s really no use falling in love with a name if you can’t secure a URL.
So that’s a little back story on our name, we love it, hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes of the process. For those that are in the trenches of naming I have included some helpful resources below, if you have any advice or like to add a resource leave a note in the comments!
//RESOURCES//
Brand naming brainstorm worksheet
7 tips for naming your business
10 rules for naming your business
16 tips for picking the perfect start-up name
5 steps to choosing the perfect name for your business
3 step no-fail formula to name your business
For fun:
Hipster business name generator
Tristan B. is the co-creator of the world’s best + easiest product photography editing tool-Foto Rx | Shopkeeper’s Helper and one of the writer’s of this delightful blog.
