This is the only post on this journal that took me longer than the project it describes. The project was a five-day naming sprint for a client we will call, with their permission, the soap company. The post is structured as a day-by-day account of what we did, what we threw away, and what survived.
Day one was research. We read the existing brand documents, three competitor sites, the trademark register for the category, and forty-six product reviews of soap. We came out of day one with a one-page brief that the founder approved by email at six in the evening. The brief had three constraints we had not started with: no names with "luxury" in them, no place names, and the name had to be pronounceable on a Danish radio ad without explanation.
Day two was generation. The studio generates names in three modes — we call them description, association, and invention. Description names say what the thing does. Association names borrow weight from a related concept. Invention names are made-up words that have to earn their meaning. We produced 217 candidates by the end of day two. About 130 were description, about 70 were association, and about 17 were invention. The shortlist at the end of the day was twenty-eight.
I will spare you the full ledger of day three, which was about sound and rhythm; day four was trademark and domain pre-screening, and that is mostly slow work in databases. Day five was the recommendation memo. Six names made it to that memo. Two of them we recommended most strongly. One of those two is the name that the soap company is launching with this autumn, and I will write a follow-up post when it goes public.