The Rankings
The 5 Best Naming Agencies
The naming firm behind some of the most familiar product names in the world
📍 Sausalito, California | Est. 1982 | Budget: Not published
Best for: Global product names, technology and consumer goods, companies that need linguistic and phonetic rigor
Clients: Intel, Procter & Gamble, BlackBerry, Coca-Cola, Toyota, General Motors, Apple, Subaru
If you've used a product in the last thirty years, there's a good chance Lexicon named it. The firm's work includes Intel's Pentium and Xeon, P&G's Swiffer, BlackBerry, Coca-Cola's Dasani, GM's OnStar, Apple's PowerBook, and Subaru's Outback. What connects these names is Lexicon's focus on how words sound and what they suggest across languages, grounded in linguistic and phonetic research rather than brainstorming alone. For companies launching a product that needs to work in many markets and last for decades, that depth is hard to match.
The firm works at the scale of major global brands; small startups may find the process and investment more than they need.
Skip if: You're an early startup that needs a name in a few weeks on a small budget.
A small naming and writing studio that treats the decision as seriously as the ideas
📍 Berkeley, California | Est. 1990 | Budget: Not published
Best for: Startups and growing companies, founder-led naming decisions, tech and consumer brands
Clients: Miro, Abridge, Inside Weather
A Hundred Monkeys often jokes that generating names is only a fifth of the job, and the rest is helping a group of people make a subjective decision together. That understanding shapes everything the small team does, including live naming workshops with the client's leadership in the room. The results include Miro, the collaborative whiteboard named after the painter Joan Miró, Abridge, a healthcare AI platform whose name describes what it does for clinical notes, and Inside Weather, a furniture brand that later added sub-brands from the same naming exploration. The studio also writes brand messaging, so the name arrives with the words around it.
The team is small by design, which suits focused projects better than large global naming programs.
Skip if: You need large-scale linguistic testing across many countries.
Specialist naming with trademark clearance built into the process
📍 San Francisco Bay Area, New York | Est. 1998 | Budget: Not published
Best for: Companies in trademark-crowded categories, professional services and financial brands, product and company naming
Clients: Not published
Catchword's philosophy is that more is more: explore as many directions as possible and generate hundreds or thousands of candidates, so enough strong names survive trademark screening, domain checks, and internal opinion. Just as important, the firm builds legal clearance into its core process rather than treating it as an add-on. In crowded categories — financial services, legal, technology — where most obvious names are already registered, that clearance-first approach is the biggest reason to hire a specialist rather than a generalist branding firm.
It's a naming-first firm; companies that also need a full visual identity will usually work with a separate design partner.
Skip if: You want naming and a full identity from one team.
Naming and visual identity from a studio fluent in more than one language
📍 Barcelona, New York, San Francisco | Est. 2002 | Budget: $50,000+
Best for: New brands that need a name and identity together, companies launching in both Europe and the US, food, culture, and consumer brands
Clients: Estrella Damm, Penguin Books, Real Madrid
Most naming firms hand over a name and step back while a design studio builds the identity. Mucho does both, which means a name can be tested visually — as a wordmark, on packaging, in a sentence on a website — before it's chosen. With studios in Barcelona and the US, the team works naturally across English and Spanish and understands how meaning shifts between markets. That makes it a strong fit for new brands that want the name and the look to feel like one idea from the start.
Mucho is a design-led studio, so projects that need deep linguistic screening in many languages may still require a specialist partner.
Skip if: You only need a name and have a design team ready.
Naming that works in China and across Asia, not just translated into it
📍 Shanghai, Paris, New York, Singapore | Est. 2005 | Budget: $50,000+
Best for: International brands entering China, Asian market names for existing brands, localization of product names
Clients: Multinational consumer, financial, and technology brands
Creating a Chinese name for a Western brand is not translation. It involves choosing characters for their sound, meaning, and associations, checking how the name reads in different dialects, and making sure it doesn't clash with local culture or existing trademarks. Labbrand was built around exactly that work, with teams in Shanghai and Singapore and offices in Paris and New York to work with international clients. For any brand whose name needs to function credibly in Chinese and other Asian markets, it's one of very few firms with real depth.
It's a specialist choice; companies naming a product only for Western markets will be better served elsewhere.
Skip if: Asian markets aren't part of your plans.
