How a Collection Gets Its Name

Every collection that reaches a showroom floor has a name, and almost none of them were chosen the way a customer would guess. The name is not primarily a creative act. It is a label that has to survive a purchase order, a warehouse label, a website filter, and a delivery ticket, and it has to do all of that without being confused with the four other collections the same vendor introduced that season.

The constraints come first

Before anyone proposes a word, the list of things the name cannot be is already long.

1. It cannot duplicate a name the vendor has used in the last several years, because service records and parts orders are looked up by name.
2. It cannot be a registered mark held by another manufacturer in the same class of goods.
3. It has to fit in the character limit of the retailer’s point of sale system, which is often shorter than anyone expects.
4. It has to be pronounceable by a salesperson reading it off a tag for the first time.
5. It should not describe a feature the collection might lose in a later revision.

That last one catches teams regularly. A collection named for a specific wood or a specific finish becomes awkward the moment the sourcing changes.

Where the words come from

Places

Place names are the most common approach, and the reason is practical rather than romantic. They are easy to pronounce, they carry a vague association without making a claim, and there are a lot of them. The risk is that popular places get crowded, and a retailer carrying three vendors can end up with three collections sharing a name.

Materials and forms

Naming for the material or the joinery reads as honest and works well for collections whose selling point is construction. The constraint above applies, though: it locks the name to a spec.

Invented words

Some vendors coin a word outright. It clears trademark easily and it is unambiguous in a database. The cost is that it carries no meaning, so the marketing has to do all the work of building an association.

The part that gets skipped

The name is usually chosen late, after the product is designed and often after the photography is scheduled. That compresses the check on trademark and duplication into a few days. When a name has to change after catalogs are printed, the cost is not in the design work. It is in the tags, the labels, the site data, and the sales training that all referred to something else.