Choosing a brand name you can actually own

Before you write a line of product, there’s something surprisingly hard to do: pick a name you can actually own. And “actually” means three things at once: a free domain, an available social handle, and no clash with an existing brand.

Why it’s so hard

• The .com is gone. Almost any real, pronounceable word is already registered.
• The handles are taken. You find the perfect name… and on Instagram it belongs to a cosmetics brand with 11,000 followers.
• Brands collide. A nice name another company already uses condemns you to live in its SEO shadow and risk legal trouble.

We dropped a dozen candidates for one of these three reasons. Each looked like “the one” until you checked domain + handle + collision.

The Strava move

The trick that worked: a word from another language whose meaning is the brand. Strava comes from the Swedish sträva (“to strive”). It’s the perfect move because:

• An uncommon word in your language is far easier to own (free domain and handle).
• If the meaning fits, the brand tells a story without explaining anything.

That’s how we landed on Taituri: Finnish for “master/virtuoso of a craft”. It fits what we do (a master who designs with you), the .com was free, and it didn’t clash with any brand. We checked it before falling in love.

The detail people forget

You have to verify domain, handle and collision together, not one at a time. And don’t tie your product’s name to your current company’s: if you ever sell it to others, the product has to stand on its own.

The takeaway

Naming looks like the fun creative part; it’s really due diligence: registrations, handles, trademarks, markets. An hour of checks saves you from marrying a name you can’t own.

It’s just one of the many invisible decisions behind a product that, to the customer, “just works”.

— The Taituri team