In 2026, if you are launching a startup in the fintech, healthtech, or sustainable consumer goods space, there is a nonzero probability that you have considered naming it Vela, Nexo, Prism, Kova, or Nora. There is a near-certainty that one of these names, or a direct variant, is already taken. There is a metaphysical certainty that if you run a naming workshop, someone will suggest one of them.
The naming committee didn’t cause this. But it definitely helped.
How Committees Converge on the Same Output
Naming workshops produce short lists that look diverse but converge on the same underlying logic: short (2-3 syllables), phonetically pleasing in English, ending in a vowel, abstract enough to work across multiple product lines, and devoid of any meaning that could offend or constrain.
These are entirely reasonable criteria, applied consistently across thousands of naming exercises by thousands of committees globally, producing a global namespace that is approaching saturation. Every available .com that fits these criteria has been registered. Every name that meets them has been trademarked in at least twelve classes. The remaining candidates are, at best, Nexo with a different vowel.
The Root Cause: Risk Aversion at Scale
The naming brief almost always includes “must work internationally,” which translates to “must not mean anything offensive anywhere, in any language, currently or historically.” This constraint systematically eliminates names with real meaning — the words that carry connotation, history, or surprise — in favor of constructed syllables that have been phonetically cleared precisely because they carry no meaning at all.
The result is a naming landscape populated by brands that are memorable only through massive advertising investment. Without seven figures of media spend, Nexo is just a sequence of letters that sounds like a medication. Our Fuck The Brief notepad has captured many a workshop participant’s true feelings about the short list.
What Gets Lost When Everything Sounds Like Everything Else
When a name has real meaning — a word from a specific language, a proper noun with history, a compound that describes the product honestly — it does work that fabricated names can’t do. It creates a specific mental image. It carries an implicit promise. It makes a claim about the brand’s character that a invented non-word cannot make.
The best brand names in history are memorable because they’re specific, not despite it. The worst are the ones that tried to be all things to all markets and ended up being nothing to anyone. There are only so many vowels.
See the full range at nobriefsclub.com/shop — where the names mean something.
