Naming a business can be really tough! Landing on something that sounds right, feels right, and fits right with your business doesn't happen overnight, and the journey to get there can often take a lot of time and discovery.

Someone that knows all about this is Designer and Owner of Raw Clay, Bekki Stovell. Bekki works with clients across all sorts of industries, including property developers, to establish and build really strong brand identities – including supporting them with finding the perfect name!

We invited her inside The Hive recently, to pick her brain on the topic and hopefully help our members create really memorable and rooted brands.

There was absolutely tonnes of helpful advice shared throughout the chat – and we got to see some really great client case studies too! Here are some of our favourite takeaways from the session, that might help if you're struggling to find a name for (or rebrand) your business:

⚡️ Try to steer clear of 'obvious' cliche choices

At the beginning stages of naming a business, people will often find themselves running through quite a lot of avenues that seem a little bit more obvious – using tools like thesaurus.com for literal translations of common words associated with their industry.

Whilst this is great for the initial research phase, you'll often find that the names you find by doing this are extremely cliche (premium, elite, supreme, inspire etc.), and they're almost always already taken by other businesses in your industry.

It's a real challenge after eliminating all the obvious choices, so what do you do next?

⚡️ Lean into your brand themes & values

If you want a business name that's going to relate to your business and what you do, it's really important that you start to think about key themes, rather than focusing on key words.

Start to brainstorm and pick out themes around your business, your story, your brand values, and what it is that you stand for – is there a running thread that you can dive into and explore? Try to uncover those unique themes, and see where it leads you and how you can connect those concepts to your business via a name.

⚡️ Be curious + open to exploration

You have to be open to explore and think outside-the-box a little bit here – especially if you want a brand name that's going to be memorable, personable, and effective.

As you begin to explore your themes you might find yourself going down a rabbit hole, researching things like mythology, symbolism, cultural references, or fables – but go with it! As you start to draw on those threads, you can begin to piece together different themes that help you tell your story.

If you decide that there's a certain concept you want to explore (say: sustainability, community, peace), start researching around those terms. Where do those things crop up? What kind of themes can you draw on? Are there novels that talk about it? Are there pieces of literature, are there poems?

Basically; explore wherever the information naturally wants to take you.

⚡️ Research, research, research!

Be prepared for sleepless nights, lots of little light bulb moments, lots of doodles, and lots of random Google searches! You have to be quite reactive and quite curious throughout the naming process, and really commit time to digging into it.

⚡ Draw up a list of criteria that your name must meet

It's also really important when you're coming up with a brand name that you draw up a list of criteria that it must meet. What it is that you need the new name to deliver?

You could think about the personality of the name – do you need it to feel sophisticated and formal, or do you want it to feel fun? This will all link back to your themes and brand values, so it's always important to keep referencing back throughout the process to see if it's hitting the criteria and also evoking the right type of emotion and vibe.

There's also the practically and logistics of a new name that you'll need to consider here. Do you want it to be easily searchable? Does it have to be easy to spell? Does it matter if there are people in your industry with something similar? There are certain industries with such a saturation of common names, and you might really want to distance yourselves away from that kind of thing.

Drawing up those key criteria really, really helps – it gives you parameters, which is a really important thing, especially as a self-employed business owner. When it's your own business, one of the main reasons you get decision paralysis around this kind of thing is because you can do absolutely anything. There's no restrictions, there's no parameters, so the more parameters you can give yourself the better.

⚡ Your brand name doesn't have to say what you do!

A common misconception about business names is that it needs to be absolutely crystal clear what your business does – but this isn't always true. Your name needs to convey what you're about, much more than it needs to convey what you do.

Marketing nowadays should do this job for you. We're not scrolling through yellow pages anymore, we search for and connect with businesses in a much different way. There are so many different ways to communicate what you do, that it's no longer necessary to spell it out (Prestige Property Developments, Premium Properties)

It can instead be done in your tagline, the imagery you use, in your logo mark, your tone of voice, or it could just be the copy that you use. Take some of the biggest brand names out there, they hardly say what they do or sell in their name – but their brand experiences and story-telling is so solid and strategic that it does all the talking.

⚡ Try to take the pressure off the brand name to do everything for you.

Following on from the last point, a business name isn't strong enough just on its own, you also then need to have the identity to back it up.

It's quite hard to visualise how a name will work until you have the finished brand identity, that demonstrates visually how that will look. We're sure there would've been times where people had said the name 'apple' and everyone thought that was a ridiculous name for a technology company, but then you are presented with the branding package that comes with that and suddenly it all clicks into place!

Sometimes people can be guilty of asking designers to make a logo or a brand name do everything, and it's important that it's the brand identity as a whole that communicates what you're about.

Try to use imagination during the naming process, and think about how you could back up the name with visuals to pull it all together (think about your interior designs and how that might tie in to this as well).

⚡️ Make sure your name feels RIGHT

Throughout this whole process, when you're looking at your list of potential brand names and words ask yourself 'does that feel like me? does that feel like my business? Because the name must align with those values and themes.

⚡️ Evaluate your current name – is it effective?

If after a while of running your business, your name doesn't feel quite right or it's not quite hitting the mark, don't be afraid to think about renaming and rebranding - it can be a really inspiring and refreshing experience (as Bekki shows us herself in the Masterclass!)

Understandably so, people are often really hesitant to rename or rebrand their business because of the upheaval and logistics of it all. But it can be really, really energising. It's your alter ego at the end of the day, it's a place you can go and promote your content and exist in a kind of business sense. So it's really important that if something's not quite feeling right, that you work on that.

At the end of the day, how are you expected to embody that persona or that mantra or the ethos. How are you expected to live and breathe your brand if it doesn't sit right with you. It's really important if you have any kind of wobbles around your current brand name that you don't feel put off by the process, because it's nowhere near as bad as you think it might be.

⚡️ If you're struggling, get external help!

This process can be quite daunting if you're not the creative type. If words and clever ideas are just not your jam, and it all feels out of your comfort zone, then find someone who can help you! There are lots of branding and design agencies out there who specialise in this kind of thing, but even friends might be able to help too.

⚡️ Use family/friends for inspiration, NOT for validation

Sometimes, after all the researching and visualising, you land on what you think is the perfect brand name for you but when you show it to others they hate it! What do you when this happens?

We think external input can of course be really valuable, but do protect yourself and the journey you have been on with your name. Only you know why you have chosen that root, and if it feels right for your business.

Don't forget that it's not all about the name, and that your full brand identity should help piece it all together.

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If you'd love to see the Masterclass Session with Bekki in full, including looking through some of her exclusive client case studies, join The Hive Members Club today!

Design by Raw Clay
With thanks to Bekki Stovell