Business Names
Ideas for Brainstorming Catchy Business Names

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Catchy business names can be hard to develop and choose. You may struggle to come up with a single name idea that you like. It actually took me three months to name my jewelry business. I had ideas that I liked, but I struggled to commit to one and kept thinking that if I just brainstormed a bit more, I’d come up with the perfect name.

The name of your craft business is often the first impression customers have of your company. So it's a pretty important aspect of establishing your company image. Taking the time to come up with a name that suits your business is well worth the effort needed to research and brainstorm your options.

Below you’ll find a pretty long list of ideas to help inspire your search for a catchy business name. Please don't be overwhelmed or feel you have to use all of these suggestions. Take what works for you, and leave the rest. Although you will need to devote some time to coming up with good name ideas, hopefully, with these suggestions you'll be able to name your home craft business a lot faster than I named my own business.

Make Your Thesaurus Your Best Friend

• Start with some keywords that are related to your business, and using a thesaurus, look up similar words.

• When you’re thinking of keywords for brainstorming, don't limit yourself to features or descriptions of your product or service, also try to think of benefits your customers get from your product or service and search those words in your thesaurus.

• Think about the characteristics of your target customers and the image you want to portray for your business. What words come to mind? Look them up in your thesaurus too and add the results to your list

• As you're searching all of your keywords in your thesaurus, make note of any words you think are interesting or possibilities. The single words on your list don't have to be part of your final name; they're just words that somehow reflect your business. Your goal is to come up with a fairly long list.

• Try not to make too many judgments about the words. At this stage, the more words you have, the better.

• Try to get a good variety of words and different parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs). Once you've brainstormed a lot of words, you may want to try combining words, and you'll have more possible combinations that make sense if you have words from different parts of speech.

• I like using an online thesaurus for this task because it's easy to click on other related words to look them up quickly.

• You can keep notes in whatever way works best for you. I like doing everything on my computer because it's fast and easy to move words around and save and edit the lists for later.

• You might prefer a more visually oriented approach though, like using poster board and drawing a big mind map with all of your keywords.

• Take the words that you liked from your thesaurus brainstorming session and look those words up in your thesaurus. Again, make note of any words that you like from this process.

Now you should have a pretty long list of good words. Try combining those words from your lists to see if anything works. You'll find more combinations if you were sure to note words from different parts of speech while you were building your brainstorming list.

Mythological Figures
Try searching through lists of mythological figures. You might find a unique business name, or at least the inspiration for it, in a list of Greek or Roman gods or goddesses. That's how Nike was named!

Most mythological figures are known for something specific, so you could choose a particular characteristic that embodies the image you want to portray for your home craft business and search for a god or goddess of that characteristic.

For example, if you use a search engine to look up "goddess of creativity", you’ll find results from different cultures and belief systems including Oshun, Brigid, Ixchel and Venus. If you try several searches like this, one of the names you find could be the inspiration for some really good business names. In addition to using a search engine, Wikipedia is a good, efficient source to start searching for lists of mythological figures.

The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English
This list is posted on many websites and is exactly what the title says, a compilation of beautiful English words. Take a look at this list for some inspiration for business name ideas.

Musical Terms
I've studied music all of my life, so I'm a little biased here. Composers use many standard, mostly Italian words and phrases to communicate musical instructions to performers. There are some absolutely beautiful and meaningful musical terms like prima volta, which means 'the first time' or vivace which means 'very lively' or con brio – 'with spirit'. Musical terms have the potential to inspire a creative business name because they are often beautiful, evocative, meaningful and unique sounding words.

The only caution I would note in using a musical term as all or part of your craft business name would be to make sure it is easily pronounceable. I've heard lifelong musicians wildly mispronounce a few of these words, so you'll need to be a bit careful here. Again, Wikipedia is a good starting place to search for musical terms.

Other Specialized Language
Beyond musical terms, there might be special language used in describing an interest of your own that you could use to come up with creative business name ideas. Maybe you're a dancer, and you could search for business name inspiration in dance related terms. Similarly, you might find inspiration in language used in your own artistic media. Plenty of areas of interest use specialized language to describe specific terms, and a lot of them use intriguing and meaningful words that could help you come up with the name for your home craft business.

Language Translators
After all of your brainstorming, you might come up with a few words that you like, but for whatever reason, they aren't quite right for your home craft business. To get variations on those words, try using a free online language translator to translate the words you like. Enter the words into the translator, and see how they're expressed in different languages.

This is the strategy I used to come up with the name Inspiri for this site. I liked the word inspire, but I didn't think it was distinctive enough. After translating inspire into several languages, and finding variations on Inspiri in several languages, I finally chose that as the name for this site.

Once you’ve looked at several sources for language inspiration, if you don't have a few good business name ideas at that point, take a look at all of your lists and see if you can combine words from different sources. For example, a word from your thesaurus brainstorming sessions and the name of a mythological figure combined together could be the ideal name for your business.

At this point you should have a list of several good business name ideas. Be careful that you don't fall in love with one business name at this stage. There is still a little more research to do to make sure the name is a good fit for your business.

Now that you have a list of several catchy business name ideas, if you're looking for some help with choosing the best name for your business, read on. In the second half of this article you'll find 14 tips and criteria for choosing a business name from all of the options that you've brainstormed.

 
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