Fritinancy

Names in the Wild: Artfibers Yarn Store

I don't knit or do anything else of a craftlike nature. (I used to sew my own clothes, but that was long ago.) Still, when my friend Síle Convery, who owns the delightful Knit-One-One studio in Berkeley, asked whether I'd mind accompanying her to a yarn store in San Francisco, I agreed without hesitation. I enjoy playing amateur anthropologist and checking out into other people's obsessions. Besides, I've discovered wonderful names in places outside my usual orbit: gun shops, jewelry-supply stores, bridal boutiques.

Artfibers did not disappoint. To enter the shop, we climbed a steep, narrow stairway that reminded me of the approach to a dance studio. Inside, balls and cones of beautifully colored and textured yarns were neatly displayed in wire baskets. Each yarn variety was labeled and--be still, my heart!--organized alphabetically, the better to appreciate the playful creativity of the names.

I just adore Big Bunz and Bitty Bunz. And I also appreciate that each yarn has a tag with a nicely written story that usually explains the name. "Nanook," for example, is "designed to simulate the fleece of an arctic animal."

Some of the other names I spotted: Tantra, Tasmania, Purr (soft as kitten fur), Tesla, Zoftig (nice and plump, naturally), Ricotta (creamy and thick), Babushka, Cheesecake, Triple Cheesecake, and Phos (a sparkly yarn).

I was told that the store's owner names all the yarns herself. She clearly has a gift for unexpected yet apt metaphors that cross sensory borders. Nicely named!

(The Artfibers website is likewise literate and stylishly executed. How can you not admire an About page titled "Coup de Foudre"?)

Nicely Named: Crixa Cakes

The other day my neighbor Margitta raved to me about a cake from a Berkeley bakery called Crixa Cakes. Now, I'm a big baked-goods fan, and I live near Berkeley, but I'd never heard of Crixa Cakes. When I located it online, I was surprised to learn it is celebrating its tenth anniversary.

And of course I was curious about the name. What on earth did "Crixa" mean? Margitta couldn't tell me; all she knew was that the owners, a married couple, were Hungarian, or maybe Russian, and that the bakery sold Central and Eastern European specialties. Did "Crixa" come from Hungarian or Russian? Or maybe Albanian or Maltese or Basque, all of which I dimly recalled having a lot of X's? Or was it a word invented to chime pleasantly with "cakes"?

None of the above, as it turns out. But owners Elizabeth Kloian and Zoltan Der had anticipated my question. Here's what their FAQ says:

Crixa is lapin for crossroads. Lapin is the language of the rabbits in Richard Adam's [sic] novel Watership Down. In the book Crixa is the center of Efrafa, the rabbit warren. It is located at the crossing point of two bridle paths.

In Berkeley, Crixa Cakes is at the crossroads of Adeline Street and Shattuck Avenue on the site of an old horse stable.

Well, I am impressed. I'd read Watership Down (by Richard Adams) years ago, and seen the excellent animated movie, too (warning: too scary for young children). I remembered that the rabbit characters spoke their own language, Lapin (French for "rabbit"), but I'd forgotten all of its vocabulary, and it had never occurred to me to mine that text for my own naming work.

In sound--crispy consonants, mouthwatering alliteration--and meaning, "Crixa" is an inspired choice for this former horse stables-turned-bakery at a city crossroads. It's fresh and unfamiliar yet easy and fun to pronounce, and its story makes it memorable. And the charming logo (see above) underscores the literary association. Congratulations--and happy anniversary!

P.S. On the sign, cukrászda comes not from Lapin but from Hungarian. It means "confectionery."

P.P.S. Oh, and the pastries? Friends, I performed time- and calorie-consuming research, and I'm happy to report that there are some delicious names on the menu. There's a Soprano Tiramisu ("with a dark streak"). There's a Rigó Jancsi cake that comes with a great story. And there are the suggestively named Fatima's Thighs, made with rosewater and almonds and a prodigious quantity of butter: sublime.

Nicely Named: Bluecoat Gin

Think of gin and you probably think of English brands like Beefeater, Boodles, and Gordon's. But at least one new bottle on the shelf is very American, right down to its historically relevant name: Bluecoat.

That's "Bluecoat" as in "American solider in the Revolutionary War." The redcoats fought on the other side (and drank those other gins).

The copy cleverly reinforces the point. "Assert your independence," says the home page. On the About page we're told that Bluecoat is "distilled in the birthplace of America"--Philadelphia--and that it's a "revolutionary spirit."

Well, a different spirit, anyway. Bluecoat is distilled in "a custom-built, hand-hammered copper pot still" using organic juniper berries and "a proprietary blend of organic American citrus peels and other organic botanicals."

The word "gin" came into English relatively recently, in 1714. It's a shortening of geneva, which is an alteration of Dutch genever, which means "juniper."

(Via Serious Eats.)

B.Minus

San Francisco clothing designer Rebecca Beeson made her name with an eponymous women's line of soft, sexy, high-end cotton knit separates. In 2006, she launched a men's line. Instead of doing the predictable thing and calling it Rebecca Beeson Men, she cleverly named the new division B.Son--a crisp deconstruction of her own surname. The name is smart, distinctive, and modern.

So why do I give her only a B-minus for the effort? Because the B.Son website is an utter waste of  bandwidth. The only thing on it is a darkly pretentious video in which a glum, hirsute fellow mopes around smoking, drinking, and watching other people having diffident simulated sex. If he's wearing B.Son clothing it isn't evident. In fact, the site offers no clue whatsoever as to what B.Son sells. There's no "About Us" copy (not even something darkly pretentious). There's no store locator. There's no way to know you haven't stumbled onto someone's amateur video site. Very disappointing.

Well Played, Goodwill Industries

When you think of shopping at a Goodwill store, you probably don't think of one-of-a-kind designer clothing. That's going to change starting today, thanks to Nick Graham, founder of men's-underwear company Joe Boxer and of the brand-development firm 100 Minute Company. Graham has teamed up with Goodwill to create William Good, a new fashion line made entirely from the stuff in the stores' discard bins.

Here's the deal: after 30 days on the selling floor, clothes that haven't sold get discarded. That's where Graham's team of five designers step in, cutting, sewing, patching, and altering to create trendy "refashioned" clothing. (And yes, the clothes are cleaned first.)

I've seen only a small sampling of the clothes (including an amusing Björk-like swan dress), but my feelings about the name are unequivocal: I love it. It's brilliant in its simplicity--an inversion of "Goodwill" with an upgrade of "Will" to "William"--and the perfect Goodwill brand extension. Graham told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that he came up with the name "within a block" of driving past the Goodwill store in San Rafael.

William Good fits nicely into the Nick Graham portfolio, too. Like Joe Boxer, which Graham sold in 2005 to Iconix Brand Group, the name sounds human, unpretentious, and classic ... with a wink.

And in a brilliant stroke of timing, William Good makes its debut less than 24 hours after the return to the airwaves of Project Runway, in which fledgling fashion designers turn random items from dumps, supermarkets, and recycling centers into haute couture.

William Good clothes go on sale today in the San Francisco Goodwill shop on Fillmore and Post, at prices between $15 and $300--steep for Goodwill, but "a steal," says Graham, for one-of-a-kind designs. The William Good store-in-a-store features recycled decor: the floor is covered in old vinyl records, the racks are made of books. The goal is to go nationwide, then worldwide--and redeem 75 percent of the items that would otherwise end up in a landfill. (Goodwill receives 23 million pounds of clothing each year.)

If you're not in the Bay Area, you can shop William Good online (with links to an eBay store).

Naming Notes: TechCrunch40

Last week the influential technology blog TechCrunch hosted its two-day annual conference, TechCrunch40, at which forty "of the hottest new startups from around the world" unveiled their products. I didn't attend (if you want an insider's view, Sylvia Paull offers a slightly jaundiced one), but I did take some time to consider the hot companies' names. Here are my short takes on five of the forty.

8020 Publishing, in San Francisco, "brings together the best of the web and print." Numbers are showing up in company names in some interesting variations (see, for example, my post on 23andMe), and this one strikes me as especially smart. In a company blog post notable for its thoughtful tone, founder Derek Powazek explains that "8020" comes from the "80/20 rule," also known as the Pareto Principle, which postulates that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the effort. "We chose to name our company after this magic ratio," Powazek writes, "because we wanted to embrace the way communities form online. In our experience, to maintain a healthy online community, you need to maintain another 80/20 split: 80% readers (the silent majority in any community, sometimes called lurkers), and 20% writers (the vocal minority, the people who power the conversation)." A sophisticated logo underscores the intelligence of the name.

Cake Financial, also in San Francisco, is "a free online service that makes it easy to follow the portfolios and the real-time trades of your family and friends as well as top-performing members within the Cake community." The juxtaposition of "Cake" and "Financial" is surprising, and that's the point: The founders are positioning the company as an alternative to conventional financial services. Yet the name isn't frivolous. "Cake" is a strong, simple word with multiple associations--from the delights of birthday cake to "have your cake and eat it too" to "icing on the cake." (OK, it's also in "Let them eat cake," which may not be as bad as it seems.) Cake Financial gently pushes the metaphor in its slice-of-cake logo--I like the way it challenges the "pie" chart cliché--and in a section of the website titled "Why Cake Is Good for You."

Spottt has a cute doggie mascot and, yes, three T's, although its logo makes the name look more like "SpotIt." The business, which hasn't yet launched officially, will provide free link exchanges, which explains the provisional tagline: "You Pet My Back, I'll Pet Yours." For my money, the unnatural spelling screams of domain desperation: I'll bet the founders tried for Spott.com, which is parked and probably has a high asking price. If three consonants are the start of a trend, I hope it's a short-lived one.

Viewdle, based in New York, Kiev, and London, is "a facial-recognition powered digital media platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video assets." So there's a reason for "view" in the name. But there's no excuse for a name that everyone is going to hear as "Futile."

Xobni, another San Francisco startup, is "inbox" spelled backward. The founders explain on the About page: "We started Xobni because we realized there was an amazing opportunity to leverage our abilities in machine learning and statistical modeling to 'take back' the email inbox for our users." OK, now I get it. But I still can't pronounce it--not even with the little long-vowel-sound bar over the "o" in the logo. Zohbnih? Ex-oh-b'nee? Fuhgeddaboutit. Some words just don't swing both ways. (But at least one prominent venture capitalist thinks the Xobni service is the bomb.)

A Few Good Names

Three new names that clicked with me:

• I loathe everything about supersizing, but I have to concede that McDonald's came up with a good name in Hugo, the chain's new 42-ounce (!) soda offering. (That's exactly six times larger than the original [1955] McDonald's soda serving.) A single Hugo soda contains 410 calories, all of them from high-fructose corn syrup, which does nothing for your body except rot your teeth and add poundage. But I digress. Yes, I like the Hugo name. Transforming the word "huge" into a slightly comical proper name is a clever ploy and a way to set the McDonald's product apart from all the other sugar-waters out there. It probably doesn't hurt that some McDonald's customers may associate "Hugo" with the annual science-fiction awards. (P.S. By the time you read this post the Hugo promotion may be history; the company had billed it as a summer promotion.)
• Moving on to a slightly more sophisticated segment of the beverage market, Vino Volo is the name of a chain of wine bars (that's the "vino" part) in airports around the country (that's the "volo," Italian for "flight"). This name succeeds on multiple levels: The two words are exactly the same length (visual symmetry), they begin with the same letter (alliterative memorability), and they end with the same vowel (assonantal memorability). "Vino" is foreign but familiar; "volo" is foreign and probably unfamiliar but easy to pronounce and fun to say. And once you learn that "volo" means "flight," you can enjoy the double meaning of a "flight" of wines: several wines served next to each other for comparison.
• The September/October issue of VIA, the magazine of the California State Automobile Association, had a short feature about Grilliput, a one-pound wand that magically expands into a portable barbecue grill for camping and backpacking. It's a nifty gizmo and a charming name that combines "Lilliput"--the island in Gulliver's Travels whose inhabitants are "not six inches high"--and "grill" without sounding forced. For more information about the product, see the Grilliput website. (Hat tip to ACD.)

New Name Beat: 23andMe

If you're a sports fan or a celebrity watcher, you can be forgiven for expecting 23andMe to be a fan site about soccer megastar David Beckham. (He wears jersey #23 for his new team, the Los Angeles Galaxy.)

But 23andMe is something else entirely: the rare company that can speak with authority about its corporate DNA. For about $1,000, this new biotech startup will search your genome and create your personal genetic profile.* It takes its name from the 23 pairs of chromosomes in every human cell--and from its "genetics is about to get personal" assertion.

Perhaps you're wondering why the company isn't named 46andMe. Keep reading.

There's a lot of high-quality DNA in 23andMe's executive team. Co-founder Anne Wojcicki (pronounced wo-JIT-skee), a former health care analyst, married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in May in a secret ceremony on a private island in the Caribbean. The Brin-Wojcicki hookup had a genetic component of its own: the pair were introduced by Wojcicki's sister, now a Google vice president, who sublet her garage to Brin and his business partner, Larry Page, when they were starting Google. (Wojcicki's mother has also worked for Google, as a consultant.) Google has invested $3.9 million in 23andMe--pocket change for Brin and Page, but a big boost for the new company.

23andMe is an interesting name for a number of reasons. Let's start with the most salient: It's distinctive. Unlike a lot of new business names, it's not a meaningless coined word with some superfluous vowels (Orgoo, Squidoo, Meebo, etc.). It doesn't go steroidal with the overused -ster suffix (Friendster, Talkster, Dogster, Napster) or coyly drop a vowel (Flickr, Shifd, Wrickr, Pluggd). It doesn't have the contorted, constructed quality of many genomics firms: BioGenix, Cytomix, DigiGenomics, Xencor, Hypromatrix. Finally, it bucks the dominant "shorter is better" philosophy and dares to be five syllables long, although with only seven characters it appears shorter than it sounds.

23andMe is not alone among recent startups in using a numeral as part of its name. But it uses the number more cannily than most. Names such as 37Signals, 83 Degrees, and Core77 are mysterious to the point of meaninglessness, while 30Boxes (a calendar site), 411Metro, and Compass360--to take just three examples--are transparently obvious.

23andMe's name, however, is justifiable yet slightly enigmatic. The 23 "story" makes sense and reinforces the serious science behind the endeavor. Meanwhile, the rhyme between "three" and "me" adds a touch of lyrical whimsy while acting as a mnemonic device.

The more I thought about this name, the more it appealed to me. There was something about the number 23--something I couldn't quite identify--that made the name stand out. So I did some research and discovered that "23" is a number with a lot of stories to tell.

• Twenty-three is, of course, a prime number, divisible only by itself and by 1.
• It's the smallest prime number that isn't a twin prime.
• According to Wikipedia, "Twenty-three is also the fifth factorial prime, the second Woodall prime, and the second Smarandache-Wellin prime. It is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1."
• Avogadro's number, used in chemistry, is 6.0221367×10²³.
• In Biblical Palestine, the Sanhedrin had 23 judges.
• In the absurdist, chaos-centered religion called Discordianism (sometimes called "Zen for roundeyes"), all events are connected to the number 23. The digits of "23" add up to 5, which also has special properties to Discordians. (There seems to be a strong whiff of selection bias in these claims.)
• In the 2007 film The Number 23, starring Jim Carrey, a man's life unravels after he reads a book titled "The Number 23."
• Twenty-three was basketball star Michael Jordan's number when he played for the Chicago Bulls. It has since been retired.
• According to an information-sharing company called simply 23--not as effective a name, in my opinion, as 23andMe--you need at least 23 people in a room for there to be a probability of 50% or greater that two of them will share a birthday.
• And 23 has many other associations.

Many numbers come down to us with purportedly magical qualities: three wishes, seven wonders of the world, forty days and forty nights. Twenty-three, though, is quirkier and rougher around the edges, less obvious and therefore more intriguing. It doesn't disclose its meaning at a glance: it draws you in and invites you to investigate further. Substituting "46" for "23" for reasons of scientific accuracy wouldn't have achieved the same numerical/associational magic.

Then there's the "...andMe" component of the name, which warms and humanizes it--and which is why I think 23andMe is a better name than simply 23. I also like that the company chose not to make the name possessive--for example, "My23"--which would have altered the relationship between "me" and "my DNA," which in "23andMe" sounds like an equal partnership.

Even if it had a terrible name, 23andMe would draw attention because of its lucky parentage. The interesting qualities of "23andMe" give it even more credibility. In other words, 23andMe represents the optimal blend of nature and nurture.

Read other posts in New Name Beat.

* Esther Dyson, who is a director of 23andMe, plans to post her genome on the Internet in a couple of months. Read her Wall Street Journal commentary about why she chose to do it.