What’s Up With Weird Celebrity Brand Names?

If you’ve been following the glossy launches of the newest celebrity and influencer brands, you’ve probably wondered, Did I read that right? Long gone are the days when the name Goop seemed silly or when anyone famous still put her government name on a line of lipsticks or hot sauces. The buzziest new brand names are impossible to pronounce and even harder to remember. Take Syrn, the lingerie line from Sydney Sweeney, pronounced “siren.” Or Skylrk, as in “sky lark,” a streetwear label from Justin Bieber. One of the most popular new launches at Sephora is a line of lotions from influencer Claudia Sulewski called Cyklar, pronounced “sike-lure.” Even the names that are easier to sound out, like Alix Earle’s Reale Actives, are likely to cause headaches.

This new slate of wonky, pseudo-futuristic names is one of the unfortunate outcomes of celebrity brand oversaturation. The trend has been building since at least 2024, when Serena Williams launched Wyn Beauty and Beyoncé debuted her hair-care line Cécred, pronounced “sacred.” Trademark databases are clogged, blocking Instagram handles and forcing entrepreneurial celebrities everywhere to declare war on the dictionary to score their coveted domain names. Suddenly, by comparison, even a name as baffling as the RealReal seems reasonable.

“Any time you have to explain your name, you’re essentially apologizing for it,” says Alexandra Watkins, the founder of naming firm Eat My Words, who named Wendy’s Baconator. Her deal-breakers for names include “looks like a typo” and “hard to pronounce.” She has seen all sorts of naming trends come and go, especially among tech start-ups. Remember when everything had an -ify on the end? (Spotify, Shopify, etc.) But Watkins says brand names are getting worse. “It’s really hard to tell your boss that their name idea sucks,” she says. Especially when the boss is a celebrity.

Chris Black, a podcaster and creative consultant, says he recently worked on the launch of a skin-care brand for a client. The team had two names it loved and tentative logo designs until its lawyer vetoed both options. “There were enough red flags and similar categories that had the same name or a similar name, or it had been dormant for ten years, but we would have to contact them and try to buy it,” he said. “It’s just too complicated at a certain point.”

That scenario is common, says David Placek, the founder of Lexicon Branding, the agency that named Febreze, BlackBerry, and Sonos. “We are approaching an inflection point in the difficulty of clearing marks,” he says. “If I had a dollar for every time someone has said, ‘Hey, have you thought about star names? Have you thought about Greek gods?’ I’d have an island in the Caribbean.”

These days, when Placek’s agency hands its legal team a list of 100 potential names, it can expect to be left with only about ten “survivors,” down from more like 50 two decades ago. While Placek doesn’t dislike Syrn quite as much as I do, he agreed that it’s confusing, especially for the category: “That could be a bank name.” He says a truncated name like Syrn doesn’t solve a trademark problem if someone else is using Siren in the same category because the two words still sound the same. But creative spelling could solve the problem of a URL. Skylark.com is a travel site. Sacred.com is owned by a company that sells domain names. Siren.com is claimed too and is currently for sale for $1.75 million.

Watkins says many founders are still stuck on making sure they land “.com” instead of “.biz” or “.world,” often at the expense of the name of the business. She says today’s shoppers, constantly bombarded with ads, care less about the exact URL and more about memorable, visual names. “This is what I tell people: Just because it’s creative, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”

In the fashion and beauty space, plenty of brands succeed despite (or, in some cases, because of) their difficult names. Knowing how to say Loewe (lo-weh-vay) is a flex, as is knowing that neither Glossier nor Net-a-Porter end with a hard r sound. But dropping vowels or adding a y looks funky, not French.

“It feels like a throwback to the early tech internet trend of Flickr, Tumblr, Grindr,” says Sierra Tishgart, the co-founder and former CEO of Great Jones, a line of cookware. Last year, she started a naming agency, Big Name. “You actually end up just saying, ‘Oh, that Sydney Sweeney’s brand.’”

Unsurprisingly, one-word names are often trickier to trademark or register on Instagram than two-word ones. The 2010s saw dozens of online brands launch with ampersand double names like Serena & Lily and Boll & Branch. But as with any trend, the popularity killed the naming convention — at least for now. Three-word names can quickly turn into “word salad,” as Meghan Markle described the first name of her jam brand, American Riviera Orchard. She changed it to As Ever, which, while arguably a better name, is also easy to confuse with the name of her Netflix show that is also named for a twee sign-off: With Love, Meghan. 

Tishgart says the best brand names have a story behind them, which is especially important for celebrity-fronted businesses that advertise a personal touch. “They should feel like real passion projects. If not, they just simply feel like a money grab,” she says. Using real or stage names is typically out of the question because most celebrities start their skin-care lines with the goal of eventually selling to a larger business and stepping away. No one wants to risk seeing their namesake business being run without their approval, as has happened countless times in fashion to designers including Kate Spade and John Galliano. Instead, they want to copy Jennifer Aniston, who was a “product creator” and co-owner of Living Proof when it launched in 2012 and promoted the shampoo line until it sold to Unilever in 2016. The big beauty and apparel conglomerates also prefer that celebrity brands have more neutral names to protect themselves from any ugly associations with a rogue founder. For example, Kat Von D’s popular liquid-eyeliner makeup line rebranded as KVD Vegan Beauty in 2021 after a series of controversial internet spats. By then, she had sold the business and stepped down from any operational role.

Instead of their full name, many celebrities and influencers pick a lesser-known part of their name. Rihanna used her last name, Fenty, for various lines, and Hailey Bieber used her unusual middle name, Rhode, on her beauty brand. (Unfortunately for Sydney Sweeney, her middle name is Bernice. Imagine whipping out your sexy Bernice bustier on date night.)

But even the middle-name route can have its liabilities. A few days after Bieber launched Rhode in 2022, she was sued by a flowery-dress line with the same name. In its lawsuit, the clothing line said Bieber’s lawyers had tried to buy its trademark in 2018, indicating the model knew her name choice might be a problem. But instead of taking some liberties with the English language, she went with it anyway. The suit was settled in 2022, and Rhode, the clothing line, shut down at the end of 2024. Last year, Bieber’s Rhode sold in a deal that valued the business at $1 billion.

Black didn’t hit any trademark barriers last year when it was time to open his own menswear line, Hanover, named after the street he grew up on. “If you come from skateboarding or music or streetwear, the best names are one word,” Black says. Supreme is the ultimate example.

The best names are often, as Black says, “stupid until they’re not.” Like Skims, the clever, memorable name Kim Kardashian’s brand landed on after its first choice, Kimono, was publicly shamed for being culturally insensitive. Another example, one that no expensive branding agency could ever have come up with, is LoveShackFancy, a name as kooky and maximalist as its tiered-ruffle flowery dresses.

If the product is good enough, a brand name becomes part of the Zeitgeist and seems fated, even if it once seemed like a risk. Still, Black predicts Syrn will probably be a success despite its unfortunate name. “The point is the celebrity who can sell it, and the name is pretty secondary, if not third, in the list of things that matter,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say it out loud until you.”