The stories of how well-known companies got their name are fascinating and varied. What considerations go into a founder settling on a name that feels right? I look at ten company names in this article, and I hope NamePros readers will add their own favorite naming stories in the comment section.
IKEA
Over my lifetime I have assembled a lot of IKEA furniture, but I never knew where the name came from until researching this article. According to Behind the Names: The Unique Origins, IKEA is an acronym. The I and K come from the founder’s initials: (I)ngvar (K)amprad. The other two letters are from the name of the farm where he grew up (E)lmtaryd, and the village (A)gunnaryd. No matter how it came about, I think most domain investors would approve of the resulting name as strong and memorable.
Adobe
Probably many of us have used the Adobe Creative Suite or Cloud, products like Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. But where did the name Adobe came from?
Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. The company started out in John Warnock’s garage, and the name came from Adobe Creek, a stream is Los Altos near his home at the time.
Starbucks
There are slight discrepancies in the online accounts of how Starbucks got its name, so I went right to the corporate site. It says the following:
Gordon Bowker, a company founder as well as a writer, originally proposed the name Pequod. after a ship in the classic Herman Melville novel Moby-Dick, but Terry Heckler was not keen on the name that was pronounced ‘Pee-kwod’ so the name search continued. Terry Heckler thought that names that began with ‘st’ felt strong, so they searched for Pacific northwest place names that started with ‘st’, coming up with an old mining town called Starbo.
That name tweaked Gordon Bowker to recall that the first mate in Moby-Dick is called Starbuck. Theyj both liked that name right off. Ultimately they used Starbucks, the plural representing a sense of community. One of many great accounts of the naming of Starbucks is Starbucks co-founder reveals coffee chain almost had a different name.
Google
The story of how Google got its name is well-known, but any article on company names would be incomplete without mention of the famous brand. The search engine started in 1996 with a name BackRub, that in retrospect would have been pretty awful. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then PhD students at Stanford University has a research project to develop the search algorithm, and that was code named BackRub.
During a graduate student brainstorming session to find a new name, one idea was to base it around the googol, which means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was actually a 9 year old who suggested the word googol in 1920, to her uncle who was a professional mathematician.
Back to Stanford, the term googol was misspelled google, and google.com was first registered in Sept 15, 1997. Apparently they earlier used a subdomain of Stanford’s site, google.stanford.edu. That domain name is still operational, now used with Google Workspace for Stanford University students and employees.
The company Google was incorporated about a year later, and started operation in September 1998. Read more about the history of Google here.
If you are wondering about the correct spelling, googol.com was registered in April of 1995, so would not have been available. That name does not go to a website the day I checked.
Google became the major component of a new holding company Alphabet in 2015. Interestingly Alphabet does not own alphabet.com, that is in use by a mobility consulting company. Alphabet chose abc.xyz for their investor relations website, while Google.com is the main Google site.
Hamilton Beach
We have a number of Hamilton Beach small appliances, and one day I wondered about the origins of the name. I had assumed, wrongly, it would be something to do with a beach and a place named Hamilton.
The company that is now known as Hamilton Beach was founded in 1910 by inventor Frederick J. Osius in Racine, Wisconsin, a small city on Lake Michigan. At the time, it was common to name companies after founders, but he was not keen to call his company Osius.
It turns out one of his early employees was advertising manager Louis Hamilton. Another employee was Chester Beach, mechanic and occasional inventor. He offered them each $1000, a considerable sum then, to let him use their names for the company name.
Read more about Hamilton Beach and how it got its name here.
Amazon
When Jeff Bezos incorporated what we now know as Amazon, the company name was Cadabra, from the magic term ‘Abracadabra’.
Early on, Bezos decided to change the name. He wanted a name starting with A so that it would appear near the top of directories. He eventually settle on Amazon, liking the metaphor with one of the world’s longest rivers. The company name was changed to Amazon in late 1994.
Caterpillar
I never thought much about why the heavy equipment manufacturer named Caterpillar, but here is the story, straight from the corporate site: caterpillar.com. It turns out a photographer suggested the name for what has become one of the world’s big companies.
Co-founder Benjamin Holt was testing various prototype early models on his family farm. In March of 1905 Model 77 was being tested, with company photographer Charlie Clements at the field to take photographs of the test machine. At first Charlie Clements thought the machine was not moving, and then, in his own words:
Häagen-Dazs
In one of Jeremy Miller’s books, I first heard the back story of the name Häagen-Dazs. The name breaks the audio test pretty badly, and also has a hyphen, and a challenging spelling. But Häagen-Dazs is now one of the world’s best known ice cream brands.
The ice cream manufacturer was started in the Bronx, New York City in 1960 by Reuben and Rose Mattus, immigrants from Poland. The founder created the name Häagen-Dazs which to him sounded and looked Danish. He felt that Denmark had a positive image in the United States, and was known for quality dairy products. Wikipedia relate the process by which Reuben Mattus came up with the name:
Kodak
Eastman Kodak, or more commonly just Kodak, was the giant of the photography sector. The company was founded in 1892 by George Eastman and Henry Strong. So where did Kodak come from, you ask.
It turns out it is an entirely made up term, devised by George Eastman and his mother Maria. They sat at a kitchen table and used an anagrams set to try different letter combinations. Eastman wanted a name that was:
Slack
The communication platform Slack is relatively new, first released in 2013. I had assumed the catchy, and perhaps risky, name related to the dictionary meaning of the term. However, it turns out it is an acronym.
According to CEO Stewart Butterfield, SLACK stands for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. Read more in Slack, the newly-public chat app worth about $20 billion, has a hidden meaning behind its name.
Apparently linefeed was the original working title for the software during the development phase. Some had wondered if the name Slack made reference to the project development term, meaning “the time that a task in a project network can be delayed without delaying subsequent tasks or the overall project,” but it seems not.
I wondered how frequently the term ‘slack’ would be used in corporate names – more than I expected. There are 973 active listings in OpenCorporates. The term ‘slack’ is pretty highly registered, in 205 extensions and 8519 total according to dotDB. Read more about the development of Slack here.
Final Thoughts
These are but a few of the myriad of interesting corporate naming stories. They reflect the diverse and often profoundly personal aspect of how many businesses are named.
It is important to acknowledge that ultimately it is the startup owner, not the domain investor, who will decide what name is right for their business.
Why not share an interesting corporate naming story in the comment section below.
The NamePros Blog has had several articles about specific company names, including:You may find the NamePros Blog article How Does A Business Choose A Name? relevant as well.
IKEA
Over my lifetime I have assembled a lot of IKEA furniture, but I never knew where the name came from until researching this article. According to Behind the Names: The Unique Origins, IKEA is an acronym. The I and K come from the founder’s initials: (I)ngvar (K)amprad. The other two letters are from the name of the farm where he grew up (E)lmtaryd, and the village (A)gunnaryd. No matter how it came about, I think most domain investors would approve of the resulting name as strong and memorable.
Adobe
Probably many of us have used the Adobe Creative Suite or Cloud, products like Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. But where did the name Adobe came from?
Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. The company started out in John Warnock’s garage, and the name came from Adobe Creek, a stream is Los Altos near his home at the time.
Starbucks
There are slight discrepancies in the online accounts of how Starbucks got its name, so I went right to the corporate site. It says the following:
In 1971, our founders got together with artist Terry Heckler to define their new brand. They wanted the company’s name to suggest a sense of adventure, a connection to the Northwest and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.
Gordon Bowker, a company founder as well as a writer, originally proposed the name Pequod. after a ship in the classic Herman Melville novel Moby-Dick, but Terry Heckler was not keen on the name that was pronounced ‘Pee-kwod’ so the name search continued. Terry Heckler thought that names that began with ‘st’ felt strong, so they searched for Pacific northwest place names that started with ‘st’, coming up with an old mining town called Starbo.
That name tweaked Gordon Bowker to recall that the first mate in Moby-Dick is called Starbuck. Theyj both liked that name right off. Ultimately they used Starbucks, the plural representing a sense of community. One of many great accounts of the naming of Starbucks is Starbucks co-founder reveals coffee chain almost had a different name.
The story of how Google got its name is well-known, but any article on company names would be incomplete without mention of the famous brand. The search engine started in 1996 with a name BackRub, that in retrospect would have been pretty awful. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then PhD students at Stanford University has a research project to develop the search algorithm, and that was code named BackRub.
During a graduate student brainstorming session to find a new name, one idea was to base it around the googol, which means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was actually a 9 year old who suggested the word googol in 1920, to her uncle who was a professional mathematician.
Back to Stanford, the term googol was misspelled google, and google.com was first registered in Sept 15, 1997. Apparently they earlier used a subdomain of Stanford’s site, google.stanford.edu. That domain name is still operational, now used with Google Workspace for Stanford University students and employees.
The company Google was incorporated about a year later, and started operation in September 1998. Read more about the history of Google here.
If you are wondering about the correct spelling, googol.com was registered in April of 1995, so would not have been available. That name does not go to a website the day I checked.
Google became the major component of a new holding company Alphabet in 2015. Interestingly Alphabet does not own alphabet.com, that is in use by a mobility consulting company. Alphabet chose abc.xyz for their investor relations website, while Google.com is the main Google site.
Hamilton Beach
We have a number of Hamilton Beach small appliances, and one day I wondered about the origins of the name. I had assumed, wrongly, it would be something to do with a beach and a place named Hamilton.
The company that is now known as Hamilton Beach was founded in 1910 by inventor Frederick J. Osius in Racine, Wisconsin, a small city on Lake Michigan. At the time, it was common to name companies after founders, but he was not keen to call his company Osius.
It turns out one of his early employees was advertising manager Louis Hamilton. Another employee was Chester Beach, mechanic and occasional inventor. He offered them each $1000, a considerable sum then, to let him use their names for the company name.
Read more about Hamilton Beach and how it got its name here.
Amazon
When Jeff Bezos incorporated what we now know as Amazon, the company name was Cadabra, from the magic term ‘Abracadabra’.
Early on, Bezos decided to change the name. He wanted a name starting with A so that it would appear near the top of directories. He eventually settle on Amazon, liking the metaphor with one of the world’s longest rivers. The company name was changed to Amazon in late 1994.
Caterpillar
I never thought much about why the heavy equipment manufacturer named Caterpillar, but here is the story, straight from the corporate site: caterpillar.com. It turns out a photographer suggested the name for what has become one of the world’s big companies.
Co-founder Benjamin Holt was testing various prototype early models on his family farm. In March of 1905 Model 77 was being tested, with company photographer Charlie Clements at the field to take photographs of the test machine. At first Charlie Clements thought the machine was not moving, and then, in his own words:
Initially the owners were not keen on the name Caterpillar, but in 1909 the first machine with the Caterpillar name came off the assembly line. The next year Caterpillar was registered as a U.S. trademark. After a merger with another company in 1925, Caterpillar emerged as the corporate name. In March 1995, the domain name caterpillar.com was registered.For a moment I was dumbstruck with amazement. Jumping upon my feet I exclaimed aloud - ‘If that don’t look like a monster caterpillar.’ Benjamin smilingly asked - ‘What makes you think that?" I answered - ‘Why, even a child could make no mistake. Just watch the undulating movement as it creeps along.’
Häagen-Dazs
In one of Jeremy Miller’s books, I first heard the back story of the name Häagen-Dazs. The name breaks the audio test pretty badly, and also has a hyphen, and a challenging spelling. But Häagen-Dazs is now one of the world’s best known ice cream brands.
The ice cream manufacturer was started in the Bronx, New York City in 1960 by Reuben and Rose Mattus, immigrants from Poland. The founder created the name Häagen-Dazs which to him sounded and looked Danish. He felt that Denmark had a positive image in the United States, and was known for quality dairy products. Wikipedia relate the process by which Reuben Mattus came up with the name:
His daughter Doris Hurley reported in the 1996 PBS documentary An Ice Cream Show that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked. The reason he chose this method was so that the name would be unique and original.
Kodak
Eastman Kodak, or more commonly just Kodak, was the giant of the photography sector. The company was founded in 1892 by George Eastman and Henry Strong. So where did Kodak come from, you ask.
It turns out it is an entirely made up term, devised by George Eastman and his mother Maria. They sat at a kitchen table and used an anagrams set to try different letter combinations. Eastman wanted a name that was:
- short
- easy to pronounce
- not resemble any other name
Slack
The communication platform Slack is relatively new, first released in 2013. I had assumed the catchy, and perhaps risky, name related to the dictionary meaning of the term. However, it turns out it is an acronym.
According to CEO Stewart Butterfield, SLACK stands for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. Read more in Slack, the newly-public chat app worth about $20 billion, has a hidden meaning behind its name.
Apparently linefeed was the original working title for the software during the development phase. Some had wondered if the name Slack made reference to the project development term, meaning “the time that a task in a project network can be delayed without delaying subsequent tasks or the overall project,” but it seems not.
I wondered how frequently the term ‘slack’ would be used in corporate names – more than I expected. There are 973 active listings in OpenCorporates. The term ‘slack’ is pretty highly registered, in 205 extensions and 8519 total according to dotDB. Read more about the development of Slack here.
Final Thoughts
These are but a few of the myriad of interesting corporate naming stories. They reflect the diverse and often profoundly personal aspect of how many businesses are named.
It is important to acknowledge that ultimately it is the startup owner, not the domain investor, who will decide what name is right for their business.
Why not share an interesting corporate naming story in the comment section below.
The NamePros Blog has had several articles about specific company names, including:You may find the NamePros Blog article How Does A Business Choose A Name? relevant as well.
