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Startups Are Starting to Choose Normal Names Again
Brands have stopped ‘disemvoweling’ themselves
From creating new words like “Kodak,” forcing words together like “Facebook,” or intentionally misspelling phrases like “Krispy Kreme,” companies have a long history of picking phonetically fabricated — and occasionally nonsensical — brand names. For the past two decades, one particularly popular business trend was for companies to drop vowels from their names; if you glanced at a list of tech firms circa the early 2000s, you might be forgiven for assuming the humble vowel was going extinct. Flickr, Grindr, and Tumblr all launched within a few years of each other, each one seemingly forgetting to bring the letter “e” along with them. Since then, a whole host of companies have followed suit — Scribd, Pixlr, Blendr, and Mndfl, to name but a few.
Even when Twitter launched in 2006, it did so under the name Twttr. A bird enthusiast already owned Twitter.com, and the founders weren’t ready to shell out money for the domain without knowing if their venture would take off (although they eventually paid up six months later, likely making someone a much richer bird watcher). This was a common reason behind the rise of companies dropping their vowels: When Flickr launched in 2004, it immediately faced the same problem. Its…
