Why naming is still done in pencil, why generative tools are wrong, and a 200-year-old method we still rely on.
Every six months a tool ships that promises to ‘generate’ brand names. Every six months we ignore it. Naming is the part of our craft we still teach in pencil — sound, scansion, etymology, register.
The 200-year-old method we still use is to read names aloud in a Friday session, in three accents, in two languages, on a phone call to someone who hasn’t seen them. Names that survive that meeting tend to survive the next ten years.
Most brand books are PDFs nobody reads. We argue brand should ship like software — with tokens, components, governance, and a release cycle.
An honest changelog: the 47 things we kept, the 12 we deleted, and the one feature that became the reason teams renew.
Most engagements start with a 30-minute call and a one-page response by the end of the week. Send us a deck, a doc, a Loom, or a sentence — we’ll tell you whether we can help and who else might.