Article
Naming a business without losing your mind
How our copywriter gets from a blank sheet to one name that survives the trademark search and the phone test.
Tomás Reis
Branding
July 24, 2026
Our last naming round started with 312 candidates in a shared sheet and ended with one. Somewhere in week two, the founder asked whether we could just use his surname after all.
That moment comes in most naming projects, and it’s a good sign. It means the easy options have been tried properly, so whatever is left standing has beaten them fairly.
From 312 names to 61
Naming runs for three weeks inside a brand project, led by Marta, our copywriter, with the lead designer sitting in.
Week one: the longlist
Marta starts from words in the client’s own world: tools, places, verbs and old product names from the workshop notes. Nothing gets judged in week one, because a bad name often leads to a good one two rows down.
By Friday the sheet holds four kinds of name, each with its own trade-off.
Kind | From our clients | The trade-off |
|---|---|---|
Descriptive | Bolo, Sal | Clear, hard to protect |
Borrowed word | Kopje, Tolk | Warm locally, travels unevenly |
Altered spelling | Turned down twice | Ownable, often misspelled |
Founder’s surname | None yet | Personal, harder to sell |
Week two: the checks
Every name that survives a first read goes through the EU trademark register, the Benelux register, both app stores and the .com and .be domains. Last round, 251 of the 312 fell out here.
On domains
Don’t let the .com decide. One premium .com on that list was priced at €18,500, while a short verb in front of the name costs about €12 a year and bothers nobody.
Say it before you write it
Names are heard before they’re read: on the phone, across a counter, in a podcast ad. Every survivor gets said aloud to four people who haven’t seen it written.
Spell it back. Can they write it down after hearing it once?
Try three accents. Dutch, French and English speakers each say it differently.
Put it in a sentence. Does it sound normal after “I bought it from”?
Ask a native speaker. Check what it means in every market you sell in.
This gets 61 names down to six. Altered spellings struggle most, since a name you have to spell out costs a little on every call for as long as the company exists.
Choosing when everyone has a favourite
By the last meeting, each of the six is set as a wordmark on real objects: a shop sign, an app icon, an invoice. Founders react to a name very differently once it’s printed on something they’d send.
“Nobody loves a name on the first day, including the ones that last. I ask founders which one they’d be happy to say forty times a day, because that’s the job it has.”
Marta Lobo, Copywriter at Okapi
A name also sets a promise the rest of the brand has to keep. Recibo means receipt in Portuguese, a promise that the paperwork stays small. Its first brand, borrowed from a bank template, looked like more paperwork; the identity we made for them is as plain as a till receipt.
Give it a deadline
Naming expands to fill whatever time it’s given, so set the date before the first list. Write down in one sentence what the name has to do, and run the trademark search before anyone falls for anything.
If you’re stuck between two names, tell us what you’re launching and we’ll put both through the same checks.
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