The strange origins of your favorite companies’ names
From
Apple to Starbucks, company names have some surprising (and sometimes
problematic) histories behind them.
Pepsi. Coke.
BMW. Buick.
Rolex. Swatch.
All the above pairs sell, at their most
basic, the same type of product, yet some people choose one company’s product
over the other simply based on name recognition or the status it confers. It’s
for that reason that so many startups put so much effort into choosing the
perfect name (and suffer when they get it
wrong). But while many of today’s companies’ names
were chosen so their customers could easily identify what they sell, or
showcase the spirit or mantra of the company–or were simply picked because the
web URL was still available, some of the biggest companies have a bit more
interesting–and even contentious–histories behind their names. Here are a few.
AMAZON
Amazon is one of the biggest, most
influential and profitable companies on the planet today–a massive feat
considering it’s less than 25 years old. It started off just selling books–but
now sells virtually everything under the sun. But if it started as a
bookseller, where did the company’s name come from?
The common story is the Amazon founder Jeff
Bezos picked the name Amazon because it started with the letter “A” and back in
1994, search engines primarily returned search results in alphabetical
order–meaning Amazon would show up near the top of results. Bezos has also
stated that he came up with the Amazon name because the Amazon River is the
largest river in the world and he dreamed of making his company the biggest
bookstore in the world.
But that’s only half the story. The company
actually had two prior names before Amazon was settled on. The first was
Cadabra, Inc.–as in “abracadabra” online shopping is so new and magical!
However, Bezos ditched this name after his lawyer kept hearing it as
“cadaver”–as in a dead body.
Bezos next settled on naming his store
“Relentless” and even registered the domain name Relentless.com, which still redirects to Amazon.com to this day. However, friends told
Bezos this made his company sound sinister and threatening.
Considering that Bezos is now the richest person in the world (worth $150 billion),
dropping the morbid and sinister names in favor of the smiling Amazon seems to
have worked out pretty well.
APPLE
Today the name “Apple” is synonymous with
“computers,” but back in 1976 when the company was founded, naming a computer
company after a fruit was just plain weird. After all, back then computer
companies had primarily technological-sounding names. Think Microsoft or IBM
(International Business Machines). So where did the name Apple come from?
Here’s the story according to Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, writing in his
2006 book iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon:
“It was a couple of weeks later when we came
up with a name for the partnership. I remember I was driving Steve Jobs back
from the airport along Highway 85. Steve was coming back from a visit to Oregon
to a place he called an ‘apple orchard.’ It was actually some kind of commune.
Steve suggested a name–Apple Computer. The first comment out of my mouth was,
“What about Apple Records?” This was (and still is) the Beatles-owned record
label. We both tried to come up with technical-sounding names that were better,
but we couldn’t think of any good ones. Apple was so much better, better than
any other name we could think of.”
It was a story Steve Jobs confirmed to Walter
Isaacson years later. Writing in his 2011 biography on Apple’s founder,
Isaacson said:
On the naming of Apple, [Jobs] said he was
“on one of my fruitarian diets.” He said he had just come back from an apple
farm, and thought the name sounded “fun, spirited, and not intimidating.”
And the rest is history, of course. The
company’s name became so well known in computing that in June 2007 when Jobs
took the stage at Macworld Expo to announce the iPhone, he also announced the
company was ditching “Computer” from its name. “The Mac, iPod, Apple TV, and
iPhone. Only one of those is a computer. So we’re changing the name,” Jobs
said.
STARBUCKS
Someone says coffee and you probably think
“Starbucks.” But have you ever asked yourself just what is a “starbuck”
exactly? The company, which was founded in 1971, certainly wasn’t named after
any of its founders. So where did the name come from?
It was one of the hundreds of names that
founders Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker considered, according
to an interview Bowker did with the Seattle Times in 2008. Matter
of fact, Starbucks came dangerously close to being named “Redhook,” Bowker
recalled:
“By that time, I’d been compiling lists of
names, and the methodology I used was to take the list and indiscriminately
choose the ones I thought were promising, maybe 100 or so. I finally got down
to about six names. I was sitting at a cafe at First and Virginia Street, and I
crossed off the others one by one, and there was Redhook staring me in the
face. At the time, I didn’t know it was the name of an industrial neighborhood
in Brooklyn. I have a propensity for using names that have ‘k’s in them. I like
the plosive quality of the sound, the way it cuts through the air.”
Another potential pick was “Cargo House,”
which Bowker said “would have been a terrible, terrible mistake.” It was
then that Bowker’s ad agency partner mentioned that he thought words that began
with the “st” sound sounded powerful. As Bowker recalled:
“Somebody somehow came up with an old mining
map of the Cascades and Mount Rainier, and there was an old mining town called
Starbo. As soon as I saw Starbo, I, of course, jumped to Melville’s first mate
[named Starbuck] in Moby-Dick. But Moby-Dick didn’t
have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the
sound seemed to make sense. A lot of times you’ll see references to the
coffee-loving first mate of the Pequod. And then somebody said to me, well no,
it wasn’t that he loved coffee in the book, it was that he loved coffee in the
movie. I don’t think even Scarecrow Video has a copy of that movie. Moby-Dick has
nothing to do with coffee as far as I know.”
There are a lot of sources of inspiration
when it comes to company names, but it’s a safe bet to opt for an apple
orchard, river, or literary reference over cultural appropriation
BY MICHAEL GROTHAUS https://www.fastcompany.com/90200737/the-strange-origins-of-your-favorite-companies-names?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Weekly&position=6&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=07272018
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