Naming briefs #8
How can a numeral be a brand name? Let me count the ways.
In the naming business, a naming brief is a detailed written document that serves as a road map for name development and legal review. (Read more about the naming brief here.) The naming briefs in this newsletter are something else: short reports on names I’ve spotted in the wild or in my reading. This report is the eighth in a series; see the intro to Naming Briefs #7 for links to previous Naming Briefs.
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We’ve all encountered brand names that incorporate numbers. Think of Motel 6 (whose room rate was $6 a night when the company was founded in 1962) or Chanel No. 5 (the fifth sample scent presented to French couturier Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel for her assessment in 19211).
Brand names that consist solely of numbers are less common. Consider, for example, another famous fragrance, 4711, whose name was originally a house number. After Napoleon’s army occupied Köln, Germany, in 1794, all houses were required to be sequentially numbered; the house of Wilhelm Muelhens, the developer of the world’s first eau de cologne, was given the number 4711, which became associated with the brand2.
And at least two alcoholic-beverage brands have appropriated 818 — the area code for L.A.’s San Fernando Valley — into their names: Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila (Jenner claims that “the area code 818 is home to me,” but corporate headquarters are in San Francisco, area code 415) and 8one8 Brewery (in Canoga Park, which gives it a solid claim to the number). In some quarters, like Beverly Hills (area code 310), “the 818” is considered less than desirable. This may be a contrarian or ironic rationale for slapping the number on fancy brands, but I can’t swear to it.
What does a numeric name communicate? On the positive side of the ledger: logic, rigor, abstraction, order. On the negative side, it can look like a complicated math problem. It’s unlikely to carry much emotional appeal. It can be hard to remember if it doesn’t have a clear, widely understood referent — abstraction cuts both ways — or if more than three digits are pressed into service. Some numeric names are vanity projects, consisting of a founder’s lucky digits rather than expressing a brand’s character.3 And numbers often carry cultural freight: Eight is lucky in East Asian cultures; seven — associated with good fortune in the West — is associated with ghosts in parts of China, Vietnam, and Thailand.4
Here’s a selection of numeral-names that have caught my attention lately:
1440 Media.
1440 calls itself “a fact-driven news and knowledge resource that respects your time and intelligence” and boasts that it’s “curated by humans, not algorithms,” even though the numeric name suggests the opposite.
A Snopes investigation, published on February 1, 2024, found that 1440’s daily newsletter “generally sticks to the facts and does not favor one political leaning over another.” The company was founded in 2017 by a scientist and a businessman; its offices are in Chicago. As of July 2024 it had more than 3.6 million subscribers and was 100 percent funded by sponsorships and ads.
And the name? The About Us page gives two stories:
“The printing press was invented around the year 1440, spreading knowledge to the masses and changing the course of history.”
“In every day there are 1440 minutes. We’re here to make each one count.”
I like those stories, and I’ll add one more: The use of a numeral reinforces the “facts” theme and suggests that “numbers don’t lie.” On balance, this name avoids the Math Class Is Tough! trap and puts a human face on the digits.
404 Media.
When 404 Media launched in August 2023, I found the name confusing. First, it was too similar to 1440 Media. And second, 404 is shorthand for “404 error” (or “error not found”) — the message you get when a web server can’t find a requested URL. Not a good association!
The wordmark (numbermark?) has a strikeout bar. Is it supposed to mean “no errors”?
It would be nice —well, nice for me — if 404 Media, which was launched in August 2023 by technology journalists who had worked for Vice Media’s Motherboard publication until Vice filed for bankruptcy, would explain its name choice. It does claim to provide “unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL.” Maybe this means “We find the resources that you, with your sub-par tech skills that result in errors, cannot.” Maybe it doesn’t. I remain confused.
I do, however, appreciate 404 Media’s coverage of stories like “A Beloved Tech Blog Is Publishing AI Articles Under the Names of Its Old Human Staff.” As someone on Bluesky observed, that’s a headline that would have made zero sense three years ago. It barely makes sense now.5
6397.
Although its URL is 6397news.com, 6397 is not a news site: It’s a manufacturer of clothing for women. Silhouettes are loose-ish, styles are casual-ish, prices are high-ish ($350 to about $900 per piece).
And the name is bemusing-ish.
The company was founded in 2012 by Stella Ishii, who at the time owned a brick-and-mortar boutique in lower Manhattan called The News. The boutique, with its virtually unsearchable name (especially in New York City, where there is an actual newspaper called the Daily News), has closed, but the wholesale and online businesses live on.
The story behind “6397”? It’s how you spell NEWS on your phone’s keypad.
Remember what I said about numeric names with more than three digits? And about tricky math problems? This is a perfect example of both. I’ve been aware of the 6397 brand for several years, but every time I’ve tried to recall the name it’s come up wrong. 6973? 6937? Do I really have to consult my phone’s keypad just to remember the name? And once I do the translation, why should I care? Every garment is NEWS at its inception. Why are these shmattes different from all other shmattes?
032c Magazine.
More media, more fashion. I discovered this name via the invaluable
(here), but I had to do independent research to learn what it’s all about.
It’s a biannual English-language publication founded in 2000 in Berlin, where it’s still based; it calls itself “a media and fashion company for the 21st century.” More self-description: “The 032c universe is a place for freedom, research, and creativity, where fantasy is reality, aspiration is attainment, and everything is culture in the making. And, like any universe, 032c is expanding.”
It’s all very arty and cool and fun to look at in a Euro sort of way. The name? It’s the Pantone color code for the shade of red featured on the magazine’s covers. This is exactly the sort of in-joke art directors and designers dig: cerebral but grounded in the real world. I’d say it’s the perfect name for the enterprise.
Is it still a numeric name if the numbers are spelled out? I’m voting yes.
If you think of a pizza as a “pie,” you’ll get this particular joke. Three One Four, which prefers to style the name in all lower-case letters, with a decimal point after the “three,” is a pizza joint — excuse me, a swanky pizza lounge — on North Berkeley’s Gilman Street, and the name is, of course, a nod to the mathematical constant pi (3.14159. . .). It opened in March after two years of planning and construction.
The idea of a pi-related name, if not this specific execution, is hardly original. There are pizza restaurants called 3.14 in Colorado, in Indiana, and in Florida, and possibly elsewhere as well. I haven’t eaten at Three One Four, but Berkeley is a university town with a lot of math and engineering students and professors who may find the restaurant’s pi-based name appetizing.
By the way, if you’re curious about swanky, I wrote about it back in 2012.
1927.
Last month I attended an inventive production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the San Francisco Opera, in which silent-movie tropes and animation produced an almost hallucinatory effect. (Read a review and see stills from the production here; watch the trailer here.) The opera, which has been traveling the world since its 2012 Berlin debut, was the work of a British production company called 1927 that specializes in mixed-media live animation theater.
1927’s website, which has an awkward URL (19-27.co.uk), doesn’t explain the company’s name. As best as I can figure it out, it’s a reference to the year in which The Jazz Singer debuted, marking the end of the silent-movie era. (In North America, anyway. Japanese movie studios continued to make gorgeous silent films well into the 1930s.) The modern-day 1927 creates playful homages to silent movies and other 1920s art forms: Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and so on.
I loved SF Opera’s Magic Flute and would gladly pay to see other 1927 productions. But I’m not entirely sold on the name, which strikes me as too cryptic and self-conscious. Maybe if the company put more effort into telling the name story? On the other hand, they’ve been around since 2005 and show no signs of slowing down. I guess this means I’m a solid Yes, But.
For more numeric naming, see this post on my old blog, and scroll to the bottom for more links. And here’s a truly ominous number-name: Project 2025.
“For Chanel, the number five was especially esteemed as signifying the pure embodiment of a thing, its spirit, its mystic meaning. The paths that led Chanel to the cathedral for daily prayers were laid out in circular patterns repeating the number five.” - Wikipedia
“Eau de cologne” gets its name from Cologne, the French spelling of Köln.
The “beloved tech blog” is TUAW, which stands for The Unofficial Apple Weblog. (“Weblog” seems quaint now, but it’s the original and untruncated form of “blog.”) Naturally, people are making “hawk TUAW” jokes. You will understand those jokes if you’ve read my Monday newsletter.
When I first got car insurance, the company’s name was the up-to-the-minute 20th Century. Eventually, of course, that began to sound a bit passé. So they changed it to 21st Century. I suppose that began to sound a bit old-fashioned too, so they changed it to the embarrassing and inexplicable (to me, anyway) Toggle, which I live in fear of needing to say.
I misread "biannual" as "bilingual" and thought... oh, that's actually very clever, naming a publication after a number if you're trying to get something that lands in multiple languages!
The pair of media outlets with numerical names is really interesting to me, because that seems to be a much wider trend in digital media: 538, The 19th, Refinery29, etc. I'm curious why this took off like it did!