- Studio
- Process
A naming project runs in five stages and two to three weeks, not two to three months.
There is no logo revision cycle sitting in front of this work. A naming consultancy that only writes names moves faster than an identity agency that has to draw, revise and re-draw a mark before the words even get discussed.
- Turnaround
- Two to three weeks, sprint-dependent
- Working list
- Sixty names, culled by stage three
- Screening
- One knockout pass per finalist name
How to name a company, stage by stage
Open any stage below for the detail. Nothing here is generic advice about how to name a company in the abstract — this is the actual order Velabu runs, the same order for a startup's first name and a twelve-year-old business auditing its second one.
Thirty minutes on the phone, not a discovery workshop. We ask what the business does, who buys it, what the founder can't stand the sound of, and what name has already been tried and rejected — that last question saves a week, because a studio that doesn't ask it re-proposes the same rejected name in week two.
The call becomes a one-page written brief: category, audience, register (is this a vet clinic or a law firm, and those two want different sounds), and a hard no list. The client signs off on the brief before any name gets written. If the brief is wrong, the names built from it are wrong, and we would rather spend twenty minutes catching that now.
Two writers work the brief separately for two days, each building their own list without seeing the other's, then combine. Sixty names is the usual yield — real words, compounds, invented coinages, a few borrowed from a second language if the audience calls for it. Nothing on this list is checked yet. Checking too early kills good names for the wrong reason.
This is also where a brand name generator tool would stop, and where we keep going: a generated list is a start, not a shortlist, and most of what a generator produces reads fine on screen and falls apart the moment someone tries to say it on the phone.
Every name on the working list gets read aloud, twice, by someone who did not write it. A name nobody can say over the phone is not a name — it is a spelling test, and it fails here, out loud, before it ever reaches a client. We listen for stress pattern, for whether the first syllable survives a bad phone line, and for whether it sounds like something else entirely when said fast.
Twelve survive. The other forty-eight are not wasted — the list stays on file in case the brief shifts and one of them turns out to fit better later.
Our editor runs each of the twelve against the federal trademark register once, looking for an obvious, direct conflict in the same or an adjacent class of goods. This is a brand name trademark screening pass, and we say the word "screening" on purpose, everywhere on this site — it is not clearance. A knockout screen catches the name that plainly can't be used. It does not catch every conflict a full search would, and it is not legal advice.
Clearance is an attorney's job. We tell every client that in writing before the final four are sent, and we mean it: treat the screen as a first filter, not a green light, and have your own attorney run the real search before you file anything or spend money on signage.
We hand back four names, not forty. Each one arrives with a rationale sheet explaining why it survived, a pronunciation note for anyone who will say it on air or answer a phone with it, and the knockout screen result. Everything is printed, even when the client only asked for a PDF — a name read aloud from a printed page and a name read off a glowing screen sound different, and we test for the first one before it ships.
The client picks one, or comes back with a note and we run a short second pass on the near misses. Most projects close here, inside the two-to-three-week window quoted at intake.
We do not draw logos. Never have. If the chosen name now needs a mark, a colour system and a website, we write a one-page naming brief for the designer who will do that work — the sound logic, the register, the words the brand should never sound like — so that designer can start the same week instead of re-running the discovery call we already did.
Velabu does not take a fee or a cut from that referral. The scope stays narrow on purpose: four people who only write names and the four sentences that hold a brand together, nothing else on the invoice.
These are our own working figures, drawn from how a Velabu naming sprint actually runs, not an industry average and not a guarantee about how any single project will land. A brief with an unusual constraint — a name that has to work in two languages, or a category with very little room left — can change the count in either direction.
A vet clinic does not want a name that sounds like a candy bar
A law firm does not want a name that sounds like a vet clinic either. The same syllable can read as playful in one register and careless in another, so the read-aloud stage at step three is judged against the client's actual niche, not against a general idea of what sounds good. Below are four registers we run this against most often.
Vet and animal-care names
Soft consonants, an open vowel near the end, nothing that could be misread as a toy or a snack brand. Warmth without cuteness — the name has to survive being said by a stressed owner on the phone at seven in the morning.
Favors: long vowels, two syllables, a stressed first beat. Avoids: hard plosive endings, anything that rhymes with a candy brand.
Law firm and advisory names
Names built to be said in a courtroom or read on a filing stay short and hard-edged, often surname-anchored or a compact Latin-adjacent coinage. Playfulness reads as a liability here, not a charm.
Favors: closed syllables, three-beat rhythm, low vowel color. Avoids: diminutives, anything with a soft "-y" ending.
Bar and restaurant names
Room to be loud, said across a bar at volume, and remembered after two drinks. A bar name earns points for texture — a hard consonant cluster or an unexpected stress can be the whole hook.
Favors: stress on the first syllable, a consonant cluster that's fun to shout. Avoids: anything easily slurred into a different word after last call.
Freight and logistics names
Said over a dispatch radio and printed six inches tall on a trailer door, so it has to survive both a bad connection and a distance read. Clarity outranks personality by a wide margin.
Favors: two clear syllables, no ambiguous letter pairs like "ph" or "que". Avoids: homophones with a competitor already on the road.
Bring us a brief and we start the working list this week.
The intake call is thirty minutes. See the five formats first, or send the brief straight through.