sprintworks Brand Identity #1- The Name

Choosing a name for a company is not easy, especially when you’re starting with a blank canvas. Pick a word, check the domain, move on. But a name does a lot of heavy lifting. It’s the first impression, the shorthand for who you are, and often the thing people remember long after they’ve forgotten what you actually do.

So what makes a good name?

There are a few fundamentals we kept coming back to:

• Distinctiveness – it needs to stand out in a crowded space
• Brevity – shorter is usually stronger and more memorable
• Appropriateness – it should feel right for the industry and audience
• Ease of spelling and pronunciation – no constant corrections
• Extendability – room to grow as the business evolves

Many well-known names come from unexpected places. Google, for example, is derived from “googol,” a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The word itself was coined almost casually when mathematician Edward Kasner asked his nephew what to call the number. Random, yes, but it ended up symbolising scale and vastness in a way no one could have planned.

That’s the thing about names. Sometimes they seem like just names. But they’re not.

For us, the name had to reflect both what we do and who we are. And to get there, we had to step back and ask some bigger questions. How do we want to be perceived? Friendly and approachable, or serious and formal? Experimental or conservative? Who are we competing with, and how do we want to sit alongside them, or deliberately apart?

Those questions led us to run a naming workshop with the entire team.

Everyone was involved. Ideas were thrown around freely. We debated, scratched our heads, voted, vetoed, evaluated, and repeated the process more times than we can count. It was messy, creative, frustrating, and energising all at once.

And somewhere along the way, sprintworks was born.