Tidbits #4 - What's in a name?

Another Weekend Wonders originally published in 2013.

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Have you ever wondered why Ebay is called Ebay? Or why ASDA is called ASDA? 

Everyday speech is studded with brand and company names. 

Yet most of us probably don’t know their origins. 

Boots the chemist was founded in 1849 by John Boot who opened a herbalist shop in Goose Gate, Nottingham selling home-made remedies. Boots now owns and runs its own laboratories and discovered the painkiller Ibuprofen. 

DIY store B&Q is named after its founders Richard Block and David Quayle. You can buy MDF (medium density fibreboard) flatpack furniture there, which is stronger than the old chipboard stuff they used to sell at the now defunct MFI stores. Incidentally, that didn’t stand for ‘made for idiots’ as some wags claimed. It was Mullard Furniture Industries.

Haribo is named after the first two letters of inventor Hans Riegel’s forename and surname and home town of Bonn, Germany. Coca-Cola gets its name from the coca leaves and kola nuts that were used in the original formula. Pepsi, meanwhile, is named after the digestive enzyme pepsin. 

Nice. 

Häagen-Dazs means nothing at all; the name was simply made up in 1961 by Reuben and Rose Mattus who thought it sounded exotic. 

Waitrose is named after founders Wallace Waite and Arthur Rose, and ASDA – now part of the larger American Wal-Mart group of companies (named after founder Sam Walton) – began life in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1949 as Associated Dairies and Farm Stores Ltd. However, in 1965, it merged with the Asquith chain of supermarkets and adopted the name Asquith Dairies, hence the name ASDA. 

Putting two names together to create a portmanteau name seems quite popular. A few years ago Chris Squire, bass player for Yes, and ex-guitarist with Genesis Steve Hackett, created a band called Squackett. What a good job Dire Straits didn't do the same with Chris Rea (joke circa 1999).

Meanwhile, when Pierre Omidyar found that he couldn’t get the domain name echobay.com (the name of his company) as it already belonged to Echo Bay Mines Limited, he bought what he considered to be the next best option. 

But ebay.com worked out okay. 

But perhaps my favourite such story concerns the now defunct electrical store chain Dixons. The brand began life in 1937 as a photographic studio owned by Charles Kalms. He and business partner Michael Mindel decided to open a shop but the premises they found only had room for six letters on the fascia over the door. So they went through the phone book and settled on the name 'Dixon'.

The chain could have so easily have been called Cheap or Nasty.

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Note: ASDA is now owned by Zubar and Mohsin Issa. They paid £6.8 billion for it. They should call it Zumoh.