Founders often bring us a list of forty names and a favourite. Before we talk about the favourite, we run every name on the list through three questions. Most lists drop to four or five in an afternoon. The questions are plain on purpose. Anyone on the founder's team can run them without us.
Can you say it?
Read the name aloud to someone who has never seen it. If they hesitate, or say it two ways, it fails. In Dubai a name gets said in Arabic, English, Hindi, Tagalog and Russian on the same day, often across a café counter with music on. It has to survive all of them.
We test it on the phone too. A name you have to spell out to a courier will be spelled out ten thousand times.
Can you spell it after hearing it once?
Say the name, then ask someone to type it into a search bar. If they type something else, people will search for something else, and find it.
Doubled letters, silent letters and invented spellings fail this test more than anything else. A clever "ph" in place of an "f" costs you every customer who heard the name at a dinner and tried to look it up the next morning.
Flux on the door: one word, said one way.
The three questions are dull on purpose. A founder's team can run them on a Tuesday afternoon without us in the room.
Mara Hollis
Design Director
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Origin®
Can you own the domain?
Not the perfect domain. One you can own without a hyphen and without a prefix nobody remembers. Check the handles on the platforms you will use. Check the trade mark register in every market you plan to sell in. Do it before anyone falls in love with the name. A name you cannot register is a name you are renting.
Reform came to us already named, and it passes all three. One word, said one way, spelled as it sounds. The work could start on the mark instead of the name, and it did, in the first week.
Everything after that is taste
Then come the questions we enjoy. Does the name sound like the product? Will it age? Does the founder like saying it? Those questions matter, and we argue about them for days. They come after the three, never before.
Flux passes the same way. Four letters, said alike in every language heard at its counter, and spelled as it sounds. The only debate left was whether it felt like coffee. That is the right debate to have.
A good-looking name that fails one of the three will cost more in its first year than the whole identity.
