Empty Vessel Name

What's in a name?

Names are important when your starting or defining a business, website, or even a blog. It would be odd to have started a fitness place and call it Fitness-R-Us or something then end up selling furniture years later.

If you give your website a name that already has meaning then it'll be hard to shape that name as you evolve. But if you start with a name that has no meaning then the options are wide open.

An Empty Vessel Name is a name that does not mean anything. When I think empty vessel, I think of a cargo ship that has no contents. It could hold anything, cars, grain, tires, lumber, anything you want.

Something that is not an empty vessel may be Travelocity, it would have to have something to do with travel or it'd be weird. How about PetSmart. Again, it would have to have something to do with pets. However, Expedia or Exxon. Yeah, they have meaning to you now, but if you didn't know the meaning what would you think of? Others have replaced the meanings of a name, think of Shell... I think that most of you would think of a gas station or oil company. But if you didn't know that now, you would likely picture the object, probably a sea shell. And if you told someone you were going to shell, they would think you were odd.

So, to the point of this article. Why I chose RehRek. Well, for starters it's my last name backwards. I had to think on it for a while before I liked it though. Also, I ran it by my wife and she was okay with it as well. I think It's a great empty vessel name. I don't think its too hard to pronounce either, which is another important trait of a name. I put the emphasis on the R's so if you say Reh then Rek you've got it. So there it is www.RehRek.com. It may be a poor choice, but I think its too early to tell yet.

There are companies that will charge you thousands to help you to choose a name. They will offer you a few that they've come up with. I know this because I worked for a company that did this and they took a name that they offered.

The company had the entire staff vote on 3 final names. I don't remember if the vote chose it or if the CEO chose the name in the end. They wanted to change their name from NoteWorld. Yeah, you can imagine what people thought when they heard the name. I thought of post-it notes when I heard the name for the first time. Not a great name for a company that provided payment processing services. They used to handle note buying, and by notes I mean that they bought mortgages. These are also referred to as notes. It worked then, but the business changed its focus to payment processing during 30 years of being in business.

By the way, re-branding is expensive and sometimes very difficult to do! Which is why this article is going under money saving ideas.

Choose a good name from the start, choose carefully, and an empty vessel name is probably the absolute best way to go in case your business changes direction and does something else. But, if you know that you will always sell taco's then a name Like TacoTime or TacoBell will probably be perfect.

Good luck choosing your name!