Picking A Business Name

Picking a business name for your online craft store for your handcrafted jewelry, unique stuff, and crafts is so important! Your craft shop name can make or break you, it really can.  Your shop name has the ability to turn your customers away, or it can make them stay.

A online craft store name should be

• readable
• speakable
• memorable
• descriptive
• simple
• pretty!

Let us never forget that word of mouth advertising is free but it is also the best advertising you can get. But if customers cannot read or say your shop name that is never going to happen. Your shop name must be readable and it must be speakable. If your shop name is made up of a jumble of letters that don’t make up actual words, that will send customers away and I speak from personal experience. It must be quick to say and read, as well, so you also want short words with few syllables.

Your business name should be simple. Use words your customers are familiar with, that puts people at ease. Using words that are foreign if your target customer has English as their first language, is probably going to alienate a great deal of customers unless your product and style is foreign as well.

Making your shop name memorable and descriptive go hand in hand. Use descriptive types of words…words that bring an image to our brain. Anything that promotes that part of the brain, also promotes memory. That doesn’t have to be adjectives, take my name for example, Desert Rubble, technically that is 2 nouns, but both very descriptive, they’re very visual words. You can go a long way towards making your shop name memorable by linking it to your work somehow, i.e. your style, the materials you use, something the customer can connect to your name upon seeing your work. Make sure you know where you’re going with your business before you do that, though. I purposely brainstormed for a vague business name because I didn’t want it to define my work.

Make sure your shop name looks good. That may sounds silly, but not all words look good and not all words look good together, so play around with your shop name in Word or some other editing program and see how your new business name looks in writing. Don’t forget to use a readable font, too…if your font is too flamboyant and the name can’t be read quickly, a customer is far more likely to skip the name or leave the shop entirely. Even if they stay but skip the name, that’s not good! You just lost that opportunity to make an impression, well, actually you made an impression, it just wasn’t a good one. People form their opinions quickly and you only have a few seconds to grab them and make a good impression, if your font cannot be read quickly by the average person, then you need a different font.

What to avoid in choosing a business name?

• using your own name
• getting too cute

Unless you already have a large following from some other work you’ve done, like maybe you were a famous glass artist who is now making lampwork beads, using your own name in your business name isn’t going to mean a lot to customers and it’s not likely to help make your business name memorable. So leave it out.

Cute business names are great….for the appropriate product, i.e. cute stuff. What do I mean by ‘cute’? Funny spellings of words and play on words. When I was starting up Desert Rubble, one of the main things I wanted was to be taken seriously, even though I was just beginning with polymer clay, I had high hopes, and I knew I wasn’t going ‘cute’ with my product so I didn’t go cute with my business name. Unless you have a cute product and are specifically going the cute route, leave ‘cute’ out of your business name. If you want to be taken seriously, leave ‘cute’ out of your business name.

Business names are so important, especially for online shops where we rely heavily on word of mouth for referrals and sales. I know we tend to see cute and flamboyant, flowing names and think how nice they are, but we need to see business names for what they can do for our shops. They can make a customer comfortable, they can help a customer remember our shop, they can make a customer stay in our shop! Or they can make them leave. Choose wisely.

Note: I was planning to try and do a from start to beginning sequence for my “how to sell crafts online” series of posts but what I realize is I need to write what I fell like writing or I’ll never write anything ;P So they will not be any order lol