The name is how it travels

A young man in Kuwait has been reselling trainers online for a few months, and for the last three weeks he has posted nothing new. He is trying to choose a name.

He has a list of forty. Some are too long, some are taken, some sound like a shop in another country. His friends vote, disagree, and vote again. Every option seems to carry the whole future of the business, so none of them is allowed to be merely fine.

I understand the pull. The name is the first thing anyone sees, it goes on every parcel, and it feels permanent in a way the stock does not.

But think of the names you already know well. Plenty of them are odd. Some are hard to spell, some mean nothing, some would have been laughed out of the room if anyone had tested them first. They are fine now because of everything that came after them: the good products, the good service, years of people being pleased. The name soaked all of that up.

A name is only the handle people use when they tell somebody else about the thing. Where did you get those? From that shop I told you about. What gets passed on is the experience. The word is just how it travels.

So the useful question is not whether the name is perfect. It is whether a customer can say it to a friend without stumbling, and find it again when they look for it. Beyond that, the name will become whatever the shop teaches people it means.

He has spent three weeks on the label and none on the thing it is meant to label.