Hey, Scott Austin here

in this episode we're going to go over how to pick a brand name and a domain for your business. Now to get started, I want to give you a couple of disclaimers. The first one is that I'm going to contradict myself during this

episode

And that's because there's no one way to

create a brand name or determine a domain.

There's no formula. There's no equation we can follow. People will have processes. And if you follow it, you may come up with the best solution for you. But someone else may give you a different process which also leads to a suitable conclusion. So there's no rules, right? There's a lot of art to this. Not so much science. With that said, let's dive into some guidelines that you can think about when creating your brand.

And my first advice is to create a brand or a name for your brand as early as you can in your process. I find that putting a name or a brand to your idea brings it to life for you and for other people. Once you put a stake in the ground for the brand name, your ideas now evolve from an idea to an actual business or to a brand, and it has its own identity.

As you talk about it

with your own team and amongst friends and people you may be socializing things with.

Now, I'm a big fan of doing research and, you know, just sitting down and trying to absorb as much information as you can about the space that you want to be in or already in, you know, and understanding your industry.

So you want to understand your industry or your niche inside of the industry that you're in, and see how people are defining their brands and determining their names.

You want to do this to see if there are things that you should be doing, because it's just expected by everybody.

And you also want to do this

so that you don't overlap with somebody

and cause

confusion, or get into legal troubles with trademarks and things like that.

You know, a real example is I have a client who sells water filters and supplies for water filters, and I was surprised at how in that industry, he's got a lot of vendors. There are a lot of brands that had KS and these in their product names, and everything was water something, right? And it was really confusing because all of the things looked kind of similar, to one another.

And the store owner had said that that had happened when a lot of Chinese companies had come in and quickly set up brands to support the products they were rolling out with, really not doing a lot of research into, you know, branding and making unique brands. They just copied each other. So there were a lot of KS and V's showing up in the brand names and water.

So, you know, just showed that lack of thought behind the whole process in that industry. So as you're researching, you want to look and see what you know, the names that companies you're using and brands you're using. You also want to look at the domains. You also want to go on to social and see what if they're using their brand name as their social name.

And what you're trying to understand is where the open area is for your industry. So if you start determining, you know, I'm thinking about this brand and you see that there's a domain available, you also want to see if there's the socials are available under that name also. And what I find helpful as you're doing all this research is starting to come up with a list of words, phrases or ideas that resonates with you for your brand.

It could be an actual brand name you're thinking about, or components to a brand name. Like maybe you do like the letter K and want to make sure it's in your brand. Or maybe you think that this word, whatever this word is, is going to be something you're going to want to put into your overall brand name. And every mine works differently.

For my mind, what works really well is socializing things and getting feedback. I spent a lot of time on my own coming up with ideas, and then as I talk them through with people and get their feedback, I use their point of view, which is different than mine, to understand things in a way I hadn't thought of early on.

So I'm a big fan of socializing what you're doing with your friends, with your peers, and getting feedback to understand it from more points of view than your own.

So here's some things to consider

when coming up with the name for your brand. The first one is that you're going to want to be unique.

If you're trying to have a high quality brand, you don't just want to be a copycat.

So you're going to want to find a space in your industry where you can carve out your own ground and be unique. And that uniqueness, you know, should definitely be in your industry. And even better, if it's uniqueness across, you know, the entire world. But that gets really, really hard. The second is you're going to want to keep it as simple as possible.

And the problem becomes as more and more names and domains get taken, simplicity goes away because you can't say, hey, I'm going to be this great five letter word in for my brand, and I'm just going to grab the domain for that, because almost every five letter domain combination possible is gone, taken already on the internet.

So this is one of those contradictions.

You want to keep it as simple as possible. Unfortunately,

you can't keep it as simple as desired. Now your name for your brand can be descriptive or not. That's a choice you get to make.

But if you're going to go the descriptive route, my recommendation is don't be

too descriptive. For example, let's say I wanted to have named my Jade Puma Shopify agency.

Maybe I could have called it, you know, Shopify e-commerce experts or something like that. That's kind of specific. It boxes me in on Shopify.

If I wanted to expand out to other platforms in the future.

But that might be unacceptable, you know, boxing in. But I wouldn't have named it, you know, San Diego

Shopify experts,

because then San Diego is probably too small of a geography for me to be focused on.

So that's what I mean by you can be descriptive if you want, but don't get too specific in how descriptive you're becoming.

So another good

piece of advice when you're setting up your

domain name and your

brand name

is to avoid using hyphens and numbers.

Now the reasons for hyphens is people won't know where to insert the hyphen when they're typing things in, so it could cause confusion.

That said, you could use hyphens

when you absolutely have to because the domain you want is already registered by somebody else, even though they're not using it. Right?

I wouldn't take a

domain name that somebody already has and add a hyphen to it

and then make that my my brand.

But if they've got the

domain, they're

not using it.

They're not making a brand of it.

You could put that hyphen in the middle. Trademark the brand name to

protect yourself from them

using that domain later on in your space.

And the reason for not

using

is that can also be confusing when typing it in. So let's say you have the word six in your brand. Is that the numeral six or is it six spelled out six?

Right. So the customer is not going to know. And that can cause confusion. And this is an example of, you know, one of those rules that, you know, people totally break because it's not a rules, it's a guideline. So

there's lots

of brands that are based on a number and they make it part of their brand identity. Now if you're a small brand, a small business, one person, you may be inclined to use your name and your brand and you can do that right.

But you have to think about what is your long term strategy for your brand. So, for example, if your long term strategy is you want to build a brand and then sell that and exit out, you know, by somebody buying it,

if your name is in the brand,

you become a really important part of that brand or an even more important part of the brand

if it's just a one person company

behind a brand.

So

think about your exit strategy. If

you want to sell your brand down the road, probably best if you don't add your name to it.

But if your name is is brand unto itself already

and you're not planning on, you know, an acquisition strategy of some, you know, big corporation acquiring that brand down the road,

putting your name in the brand

is one way to become unique and tie things together.

But in general, I recommend that most brands that are selling products don't include the owner's name in that,

you know you're only going to include the owner's name on services,

and even then for services, it's

completely optional, and I actually don't recommend it.

Now, one of the hardest parts

about naming your brand is coming up with a domain that matches your brand.

It's really easy to come up with ideas for brand names that aren't trademark, that aren't in use in your geography and your governmental organization, whether it's states, countries, whatever. But it's much harder to find it where the domain is not taken because it's completely legal to have a brand name in your industry. That's the same as another brand name, but that's in another industry.

So those aren't seen as conflicts. But if that other brand name, that other industry has already secured the domain that you're looking at, then you're blocked out from getting that domain. So a lot of times what we see is the brand will register. I mean, it's close to the brand name but not exactly the same. So as you're doing your naming, you're going to want to be looking at constantly domain availability.

You're also going to want to do a trademark search while you're nailing down what your your name is going to be for your brand.

And just like we have this consideration for our domain name,

we're also going to look at can we secure the social handles for our brand.

You know, if you

think it's important for you to be on TikTok

or Instagram or Facebook,

you're going to make sure that

you can secure a unique identity on those channels

that supports your brand.

And you're also going to want to think about the cultural

or international impacts of your brand.

You know,

we've all heard the examples

before of where a brand, you know,

from an American company like the Nova car, right,

sounded like a great name in the United States. But when they took that to Spanish speaking countries, Nova means not

go.

And all

of a sudden that's not the best name for a car. So you're gonna want to think about cultural and international aspects of your naming decisions.

And I

find the best way to do that is just to socialize your ideas as broadly as possible, get as much feedback from as many different points of view to think about those things that you just don't think about because of where you are in life.

Want to build a loyal community around your brand. Events and classes are the perfect way to connect with your customers. But only if your calendar looks as professional as your store. But embedding a Google Calendar just won't cut it, as the calendar looks clunky and doesn't reflect your brand. That's why we created branded calendar, the Shopify app that lets you embed Google Outlook or Apple calendars in your store while seamlessly matching your store's branding.

Originally crafted for our private clients, Branded calendar was so successful, we turned it into an app for every Shopify store with branded calendar. You're in control of how your calendar looks and where it appears on product pages, contact pages, blog articles, or even your home page. Keep your customers informed with schedules for retail hours, classes, or events. You can even share multiple calendars to meet different needs.

And the best part? Branded calendar includes a robust, always free plan so you can start building community. Risk free. Engage your community and stay on brand with branded calendar.

So what you see on the screen right now is a list of 20 or so Shopify brands. And I just look for a list of top Shopify brands, and I just pulled that list down as they were, so I didn't edit that at all. And what you'll notice in this list of top Shopify brands is every single one of them is a.com.

Now, an e-commerce brand can get away without being a.com, especially if you're like only going to be in a specific country, like if it's a German only store or an Australian only store, you could have the local country domain, but an international brand is going to want to be in a.com or another non country specific top level domain.

That said, I find that the dot coms are still the, you know,

far and away

the most accepted domain for brands.

I wouldn't try to get cute with all those other domain names

that they have now,

like Bert or Dot store and all those kind of things.

Those do exist. There's plenty of them out there,

but real professional

brands, I find, are

99% of the time.

E-commerce

now on the Shopify stores are all dot coms, and as you look at them, almost every single one of them. The domain name exactly matches the brand name.

The exception to that is Blackstone, where the brand is Blackstone,

but the domain name is Blackstone products. But also remember these are the top Shopify brands out there. So these brands are making a lot of money and have money to secure buying a domain name to match their brand.

Now, when you do lock down your brand name and your domain,

what you're gonna want to do is take some actions to secure that in the first step you want to do is to actually register to me.

I recommend just

going to go daddy and register the domain at GoDaddy. And

I recommend GoDaddy because it integrates with lots of other services like you can easily connect your GoDaddy domains, your Shopify store

more easily than if you'd use the different type of domain registrar.

The second thing is, if your brand is different than your company name,

you're going to want to file a DBA doing business as so that you have the rights to, you know, use that brand name

and the process for that, you know, varies by governing body. But here in California,

I tried to go down to the local San Diego Chamber of Commerce and file a piece of paperwork and lastly, you're going to want to register your trademarks.

This isn't absolutely essential on day one, but like I mentioned earlier, we've got a separate

episode.

about trademarking. So we'll go into that in a little more depth there. And my big recommendation in naming your brand and locking down your domain is to just get it done. It's easy to do analysis paralysis here. You can come up with, you know, billions of different combinations.

You could, you know, have all these different, you know,

tools that you put together to figure out all of your different options.

then making that decision of, this is the one I'm going to go with can be really hard, because

reality,

there's no perfect answer. Like I said earlier, all the good ones are already taken. So you know you're playing with all leftovers, so you're never going to be perfectly happy with one.

But it's important to just not spend too much time on this right now. As you're defining your brand, you're in the early stages of building your brand, right? It's more important to be making decisions and moving on to the next task than it is to find the absolute perfect solution, because there is no absolute perfect in this situation.

But don't try to find that absolute perfect solution and circle around for weeks and weeks on this process. I recommend people get this done in a weekend. Give yourself one weekend to do all the stuff we're talking about here, and by Sunday night you've secure your domain. You've done all the other things you need to do to lock things down, and then you just accept that decision and move on.

Because the beautiful thing is, you are not locked in to your brand name. Now, it is a little bit of work to change your brand name. And if you're a company like Twitter, you're absolutely moronic. To change Twitter's name to X after the company's been around for 12 years in that brand establish. But for your business, that is a new founding business.

Changing your brand is not hard and really doesn't have that much impact because you haven't established your brand reputation yet.

I've started four companies in the past decade or so, and two of those companies, we changed the brand in the first year or to one. We changed the brand because the original brand we came up with didn't fit and wasn't simple enough.

And once we got some funding, we actually bought a domain. And then we changed our brand to support that, you know, domain. And the domain was, you know, a one syllable, five letter domain that costs us money, money we didn't have when we first started. But once we got some funding, we had enough money to buy a domain.

And so then we changed our brand

and the other company. We actually pivoted what the company was about, and we had a product and a customer base that was in one direction. So we had a brand that map to that. When we changed the product and the customer focus, we had to change the brand behind the company also.

So this is an important decision, but it doesn't have to be a permanent decision. And it's better to make a decision now and keep moving than to get caught up in analysis paralysis at this stage. And here you can see some examples of some very famous brands

that started off with one name

and changed their name down the road to another brand.

Just to reaffirm for you that, you know, this isn't a do or die decision. It's an important one. But it's not. It's not cast in stone when you're done,

and they just give you a little bit of an example of how I personally did this for my current company, Jade Puma. So back in 2018, I was going to start a new agency focused on Shopify.

Jay Puma didn't have that name back then, and here's how I went and figured out what the name of my company and my brand was going to be.

The first thing I did is I came up with a brainstorm of a whole bunch of words, and I actually I live on Emerald Street, so I started off with Emerald,

and I liked Emerald because it was a precious jewel, and it was also green, the color of money.

And we're in e-commerce and it is about money. So I actually like that. I like the green, I like the jewel part of it. But Emerald is also a three letter word. But I started off with that. And then I started thinking about two word combinations, and I started thinking about, you know, animals as my second word.

So I had a jewel and an animal. I tried other things in animals. But animals ended up working better, and I started picking animals there, or, you know, survivors in their ecosystem at the top of their ecosystem. So words like, you know, tiger

and eagle and things like that.

I quickly started, you know, building off on those two directions with two different word lists, a whole bunch of different words that made sense.

And then I just started combining them in all sorts of different ways. And I probably a thousand of these word combinations. When I was finished with that brainstorming process. And then I went through and like I said before, I do a lot of research and a lot of homework, maybe a little too much. Right? So I had this list of 1000, and then I went through and checked every single one of the thousand on the mean availability.

And then from that list of 1000, I probably came up with 100 or so where the domain was available, and none of them were perfect, not even close. All my favorite things and my thousand, you know, list of words. They all got knocked out because the domain was registered, or there's already a company with it, or all the social was gone and all those kind of things.

So of that list of 100 of them that were left, I then stack rank them to the ones I like the most, and I socialized that with my my friends and my family and came up with what I thought was the best one at that time, which was Jay Puma

and reaffirm with Jade Puma. I started doing some searches for Jade Puma, and there wasn't almost anything out there about that.

There was like somebody on Twitter had Jade Puma register, but it was available on Facebook, it was available on Instagram. You do searches and all you'd get was, you know, green colored Puma sneakers, completely unrelated to what I was doing.

So I felt

confident that I could easily own that name and that brand on the internet.

And I also liked

it because I could tell a story behind Jade Puma.

Right. So jade is a semi-precious stone

and the puma, which is a mountain lion. All right. That's North America's most versatile big cat.

Lions and tigers are in Africa and Asia. But here in North America, where I'm at, the puma is the big cat

that rules the land,

a G puma. We can put the story together that, you know, we kind of have these mystical skills that allow you, our clients, Shopify stores, to be successful and dominate in your ecosystem and in your niche of e-commerce.

So that was it made the decision to secure the domain. And I was off to the races.

Now that's just my example of how I name Jade Puma. You don't have to follow that at all. But what you do have to do is put a stake in the ground and determine what the name of your brand and your domain is going to be, so that you can be done with that task and start moving forward onto the next task of building your brand.

So I wish you luck in locking down the name of your brand and securing that domain and connecting. That's your website, so we can keep your brand moving forward. Thanks for watching.