We really need a name

Gareth    Planning    

There’s been a lot written about naming companies. Ryan Carson’s excellent blogs carsonified and barenakedapp cover this in some detail, so I’ll be brief.

The naming process for us was long and painful. Right from the outset, we decided that the name must have a complete set of free domain names, or ones we could buy cheaply. Matt wrote a quick script that took our text files and checked them against the registry, saving us a lot of time. In addition to this, we had the following thoughts:

• Must be generic enough to allow later expansion
• Should avoid terms like ‘net’ or ‘web’ !!
• Must be short, i.e. under 8 characters
• Should be ‘catchy’ and easily remembered
• Easy to spell

We then found a tool on the net, called nameRazor, which was actually quite useful. It didn’t come up with the name in the end, but it definitely helped us get there.

For 5 days or so, we would leave work and come back the next day with at least five new names each. Most of them were total rubbish, but somewhere in the middle of this, we hit upon ‘togs’, as in ‘clothes’ or ‘gear’. This really stuck for some reason, and whenever we tried to leave it behind, it would return into the mix.

In the end, after lots of different plays on ‘togs’ we agreed on ‘webtogs’, we had originally stipulated that we didn’t want any Internet terms in the name, but this one stuck!

Some of the others that lasted longer than 10 seconds: outsidekit, countrysports, tog360, outsidein, outdoornet, getoutdoors, getout

I found this page from my old notebook, written during one of the (very long!) meetings…

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