How to Name a Product Business You Won't Outgrow

Nearly every founder I mentor spends weeks on the name and about four minutes on the two checks that decide whether they get to keep it. It is the one decision you make before you have any evidence of anything. It is also the hardest one to undo, because everything else gets built on top of it. Packaging, woven labels, a trade mark, a domain, a customer base that knows how to spell it.

How do you choose a name for a product business?

Name the promise, not the first product, then check you can actually own it before you fall in love with it. That is the whole answer.

Most founders do it the other way around. They name the thing they are making right now, and then spend the next five years explaining that the business sells more than that. The Cot Company is a great name until the day you want to sell a bed.

Three tests, in this order. Can you own it legally, in the class your product sits in. Can you own it online, the domain and the handles, exactly. Will it still work in five years when the range has grown and you are selling in another country. A name that fails any of those costs more to fix than a rebrand ever sounds like it should.

Why founders pick a name they outgrow

Incy Interiors was named when the business was cots. The range grew up. The name did not.

We ended up selling furniture and homewares to families whose kids were well past a nursery, with a name that still pointed at the smallest version of the customer. That is survivable. Plenty of good brands carry a name that no longer quite fits. But it costs you a little bit of explaining every year, forever, and you never get that back.

Source Haus is the opposite. It says what we do, so I do not have to. Good Goods World was deliberately broad, because by now I have learned that whatever I think a business is on day one is not what it will be on day one thousand.

So the question is not whether you like the name. It is whether the name still works when the business is twice the size and selling something you have not designed yet. The name is a container for the story, and if you have not worked out the story yet, start with how to build a brand story and come back to the name afterwards.

What to check before you commit

Do all of this before you print anything, and before you tell anyone.

• Search the name on IP Australia in the class your product sits in. Jewellery is class 14. Furniture is class 20. Clothing and footwear are class 25. Retail is class 35. A name can be free in one class and owned in another.
• Check the .com and the .com.au together. If the .com is parked by someone who wants five figures, you have not found a name, you have found a problem for later.
• Check the handles exactly, with no underscore and no extra word. If you need to add the word the, or studio, or official, everyone will get it wrong forever.
• Say it out loud on a phone call. If you have to spell it, you will be spelling it to every stockist, every freight forwarder and every customer for the life of the business.
• Type it into a phone with autocorrect on and see what it turns into.
• Search it in the markets you want to sell into. Clean in Australia means nothing if a competitor owns it in the US.
• Say it next to the word sale and the word wholesale and make sure it still sounds like a brand.

Does registering a business name protect it?

No. This is the most expensive misunderstanding in Australian small business.

Registering a business name with ASIC gives you the right to trade under that name. It gives you no exclusive right to it. Nobody is stopped from using it. Someone else can register the same word as a trade mark, and then you are the one who has to stop, three years and a lot of brand building in.

A trade mark is the thing that gives you ownership. A business name registration is a notification. They cost very different amounts for a reason.

How much does it cost to trade mark a name in Australia?

A few hundred dollars per class, and the fees move, so check IP Australia for the current numbers. If you sell product and you also sell retail, that is more than one class.

The reason founders skip it is that it feels like something you do once the business is real. The cost of skipping it is that you find out the name is not yours at the exact moment it starts being worth something. That is not a coincidence. Nobody comes after a name that is not selling.

File before the first packaging order, not after the first good month. I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice, so check IP Australia or talk to an IP solicitor before you rely on it. The rest of the groundwork sits in how to protect your product idea before you launch.

Will the name physically fit on the product?

This is the question almost nobody asks, and it is the one that quietly costs money.

A name has to live on things that are much smaller than a website. A woven label inside a seam. A swing tag. An embossed strip of leather. The inside of a ring. At Good Goods the jewellery is stamped, and there is very little room on the inside of a band, which means a long name either gets abbreviated into something you did not choose or gets left off entirely.

Long names also cost more on packaging, because they push you into bigger print areas and more plate changes. A short name with no punctuation is cheaper to make, every single order, for the whole life of the business.

A buyer at a shop sees your name on a line sheet, a carton label and a shelf before a customer ever sees your website, so if you are heading into wholesale and stockists, the name has to survive being printed small and read fast. Source Haus has the execution detail on getting a name onto labels, stamps and boxes without blowing up your timeline, in how to source custom packaging overseas.

Should you name it after yourself or your kids?

Your own name works while you want to be the brand and gets awkward when you do not. It also makes a sale harder, because a buyer is purchasing your name and then trading under it without you. Some founders are fine with that. Decide now, not later.

Naming it after your children dates in a different way. The name is tied to a stage of their life, they did not agree to it, and one day they are twenty three and the brand is still named after a nickname they hated at six.

Neither is a mistake. Both are a decision you only get to make once.

What the name is worth when you sell

I have been through a sale, and the thing a buyer is actually buying is the name and what is attached to it. The stock gets counted. The name gets valued.

If you hold the trade mark, the domains and the handles, that is a clean asset and it prices like one. If you do not, the buyer's lawyers find that out in the first week, and either the price moves or the deal gets conditions attached to it. Either way you pay for the thing you did not do in year one, which is a good part of why I wrote how to sell a product business.

When should you rebrand instead?

Changing a name is expensive, but it is not fatal, and it is cheaper now than it will ever be again. Do it if the name is legally unusable, if it blocks the category you are actually moving into, or if customers consistently get it wrong.

Do not do it because you are bored of it. Founders get sick of their own branding years before customers even notice it. That feeling is not a strategy.

What I would do differently

• File the trade mark before the first packaging order, not after the first good month.
• Buy the .com even when the price feels silly, before anyone knows the name.
• Name the promise, not the product.
• Skip the clever name. Clever needs explaining, and you will be explaining it for a decade.

You will not find a perfect name. There is no perfect name. A name you can own, spell on the phone, stamp on a ring and still use when the range has grown is enough, and it is more than most businesses start with.