Naming used to have two hurdles: does it sound right, and is the domain free. Both still stand. Four more have been added since, and one of them did not exist when most of the brands we work with were named.
The gauntlet a name has to survive
Pronunciation in every market you sell to. A Warsaw brand shipping to Berlin and London needs a name a German and a Brit can say on the first attempt and spell on the second. Our test is a phone call: say it once, then ask the other person to spell it back. If they hesitate on the phone, every future customer hesitates in a search bar.
Trademark sanity. Not a legal opinion, a reality check. Ten minutes in the EUIPO and Polish Patent Office databases for your classes, before anyone falls in love. We have watched a founder lose a favourite name eight weeks into a build, and the expensive part was not redrawing the mark, it was the month of decisions that had been made downstream of it.
Domain and handles. The .com is less decisive than it was, and a good .co, .studio or .pl is fine for a brand that sells where it lives. Handles matter more, because a handle is a string people type. What is still disqualifying is an established competitor sitting on the exact name in your category.
How machines parse it. This is the new hurdle, and it is where descriptive names quietly break.
Why generic names disappear in AI answers
Call yourself Warsaw Candle Company and a model writing about the best candle makers in Warsaw cannot distinguish your name from its own description of the category. The string is not distinctive, so nothing can be attributed to you with confidence, and the mentions that should be accumulating around your brand scatter across the category instead. The same thing happens in a review, a podcast transcript and a forum comment.
A distinctive string does the opposite. Every mention of it anywhere on the web is unambiguously about you. There is no competition for the exact token, no disambiguation step, nothing for a model to hedge about. Ten years ago that was a nice-to-have. Now it decides whether you are nameable in an answer.
A descriptive name borrows meaning from its category. A distinctive name accumulates its own, and accumulation is the whole game.
When a made-up word wins
Invented names start empty. That is both the cost and the point: nothing competes with them and nothing contradicts them, but you have to fill them yourself, through content, packaging, service and time. If you have a story engine, a founder who speaks, a product with a view, an invented word compounds fast. If you plan to be quiet for three years, it just sits there looking like a typo.
The middle ground is where most of our favourite work lands: a real word used obliquely. Balans for phone cases, Soma for candles. Real words are easy to say and spell, which clears the pronunciation hurdle, and used away from their literal category they stay distinctive enough to own.
When descriptive still wins
Descriptive names are not a mistake, they are a trade. If you run a local service business whose customers search by category and never need to feel anything, being called what you do is efficient and honest. The trade is that you can never be larger than the category, and you compete on rational grounds forever. Fine for boiler repair. Fatal for a fashion label that wants fans.
How we run it
We generate widely, AI included, because volume is cheap and the tenth idea is rarely the best one. Then we cut hard. Five candidates go through the phone call test, the trademark search, the handle check, and a query to three assistants asking what the word already means to them, which surfaces the associations no brainstorm ever does.
Then the founder lives with the final two for a week and says them out loud: in the shop, to a supplier, on a call, at dinner. Almost everyone we have done this with arrived with a favourite and left with a different one. Nobody has asked for the original back, which tells you how much of naming is taste in a room and how much is a word surviving contact with the world.