The Surprising Origins of 10 Famous Brand Names

The name comes from googol — mathematician’s shorthand for a 1 followed by a hundred zeros — chosen to hint at a search engine that could handle a near-endless pile of information. The founders liked the idea of all that scale in a single word.

The twist is that “Google” is a mistake. During a 1997 brainstorm at Stanford, a student checking whether the domain was free typed it wrong, spelling googol as google. The wrong spelling was available, Larry Page liked it, and he registered it that same night.

Before it was Nike, the company was the far less poetic Blue Ribbon Sports. Phil Knight reportedly favored “Dimension 6,” which tells you how close we came to a very different swoosh.

The save came from an early employee, Jeff Johnson, who says the name arrived in a half-asleep flash: Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. It’s hard to imagine a better fit for a company that sells the feeling of winning — and they landed it with hours to spare before the paperwork went in.

You’ve probably heard that Adidas stands for “All Day I Dream About Sports.” It doesn’t. That’s a backronym — a phrase invented later to fit letters that were already there — and it only started floating around decades after the company existed.

The truth is simpler and more personal. The founder was a German cobbler named Adolf Dassler, known to everyone as Adi. Stitch his nickname to the first syllable of his surname — Adi Das — and you have it. His brother Rudolf, after the two fell out, built a rival from the same recipe: Ruda, which became Puma.

A North Carolina pharmacist named Caleb Bradham mixed up a fizzy drink in the 1890s and first sold it, modestly, as “Brad’s Drink.” When he rebranded in 1898, he reached for something that sounded a bit more medicinal.

He landed on Pepsi — echoing dyspepsia, the old word for indigestion, and the digestive enzyme pepsin — because he pitched the drink as a tonic that settled the stomach. So the name is, at its root, a promise to help with an upset gut.

The founders wanted something evoking the sea and the old coffee-trading routes. They very nearly called it Pequod, after the ship in Moby-Dick, until someone pointed out that “a cup of Pequod” doesn’t exactly make your mouth water.

So they went one deck over and borrowed Starbuck, the novel’s steady, level-headed first mate, and added an s. No connection to the character’s personality — they just liked the sound and the salt-air romance it carried.

Jeff Bezos first wanted to call it Cadabra, as in abracadabra. His lawyer talked him out of it after hearing “Cadabra” over the phone and thinking he’d said “cadaver” — not the vibe for a new bookshop.

Flipping through a dictionary, Bezos stopped at Amazon: the largest river in the world, for a company he wanted to be the largest of its kind. A name starting with “A” was a bonus, since it would sit near the top of any alphabetized list. (The A-to-Z arrow in the logo came later — a nod to selling everything from A to Z.)

The Danish carpenter behind the bricks, Ole Kirk Christiansen, built the name from two Danish words — leg godt, meaning “play well.” For a toy company, it’s about as on-the-nose and lovely as a name can get.

Here’s the happy accident: years later someone noticed that lego in Latin can be read as “I put together” or “I gather.” Nobody planned that; the company has said it was pure coincidence. Two languages, and both of them describe exactly what you do with the bricks.

The name is just a plain-spoken list of what originally went in. “Coca” for the coca leaf and “Cola” for the caffeine-rich kola nut — the two headline ingredients of the 1886 tonic mixed up by Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton.

His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, suggested spelling both with a C for the look of it, and wrote the name out in the flowing script the brand still uses today. (The coca leaf’s cocaine was quietly removed from the formula around 1903; the name, of course, stuck.)

IKEA is an acronym, and every letter belongs to its founder’s world. Ingvar Kamprad started the company in 1943 as a seventeen-year-old in rural Sweden.

The I and K are his own initials. The E is for Elmtaryd, the family farm he grew up on, and the A is for Agunnaryd, the nearby village. So the name over every blue-and-yellow warehouse on earth is really just a Swedish teenager, his farm, and his hometown.

It looks Scandinavian, umlaut and all. It isn’t. “Häagen-Dazs” is completely invented — it has no meaning in Danish or any other language, and that umlaut doesn’t even exist in the Danish alphabet.

Founder Reuben Mattus, a Jewish immigrant in the Bronx, cobbled it together in the 1960s to sound exotic and premium, and as a small tribute to Denmark’s protection of its Jews during the war — he even put a map of the country on early cartons. A made-up word, sold as old-world luxury, and it worked completely.