15+ years of professional naming experience
It’s what I started in branding and it’s where I’m focused now
Broader branding experience
Managing strategic, verbal and visual identity development
Language precision
Unique inclination to distinguish and unpack nuanced linguistic impact
Strategic communication foundation
Ensuring strategic foundation for creative expression
Trademark viability awareness
Extensive experience with legal reviews has given me a leg up in identifying what may be available
Unique language construction
Making up or coining new words is a task that most people never do, and I’m practiced
Foreign Language Studies
Formal studies in Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin, French & Hebrew
Global perspective
Extensive travel and cultural exposure to support language studies
Attention to phonetic qualities
Identifying the emotive qualities of phonetics rooted in prominent language associations
Sensitivity to letter-form aesthetics
Envisioning the design opportunities inherent of language and a sensitivity to typography
What gets a name?
Brands get a name. Offerings get a name. Companies, products and services, all get a name.
Depending on the context and the type of language that’s appropriate, the approach to get there can differ. I can help you figure out what sort of label is most appropriate.
EXPRESSIVE POETRY
Beautiful names focus on launching a story, idea or experience. They can be highly evocative and act as stepping stones into a creative universe. Names can be intellectually stimulating, create curiosity and wonder, conjure physical and emotional sensations and drive a deeper, more abstract attachment. There is a wide breadth of name constructs and styles to explore, each with their own unique beauty and value.
LANGUAGE PRECISION
Sometimes, a name is more of a label or a descriptor. Its primary function is to ease navigation through a large portfolio or to aid in selection by being highly descriptive of a benefit. But just because the outcome is elegantly simple doesn’t mean that it’s simple to do. There’s great benefit to be had in diving deep, exploring every possibility and opportunity, and considering all of the nuanced permutations of language and letters. I dig through and expose every opportunity as well as identify and set aside all of the noise and clutter, so you leverage language that will be most effective for its unique purpose. And when you don’t take advantage of this opportunity to maximize the impact of an incredibly powerful, albeit sometimes subtle message, you’re selling your brand short.
My Story
My Journey
My Voice
Professionally… I got started in 2006. A dear friend of mine was working in pharmaceutical branding at InterbrandHealth and they were looking for new freelance namers. She thought, well, Ragen has studied all these foreign languages and has this odd way of intuitively naming and renaming things, so, maybe he should give it a shot. And I did. And you know how pharmaceutical names are. They’re odd. They’re constructed language (conlang), so having an understanding of multiple languages and how they were constructed allowed me to dissect existing components of words across several languages and put them back together again to create an entirely new word. It was like a language puzzle - and I was hooked. And apparently, so was InterbrandHealth. And that’s how a long and fulfilling career in naming was launched
But really… I started naming when I was 10 years old. There were three other kids in my class named David. One of them was my best friend. His Dad was named David too. So you can imagine, dinners at the Dutkus household could get confusing. And that’s when I started going by Ragen, without even knowing about all of the wonderful things associated with that name. And this was kind of my first strategic naming move. Not incredibly inventive, but the right approach to stay true to my core identity while creating an opportunity for clarity and differentiation.
Soon thereafter, I got an iguana. Two of my best friends had iguanas. One named his Iggy the Iguana. Sure, that makes sense, slightly modify existing highly descriptive nomenclature to retain a clear verbal link but but make it feel a bit more proprietary. Had he done a competitive audit, he’d have learned that a big portion of other 12 year old boys in the country who just got an iguana did the same thing. My second friend named his Spike. Ok, that’s cool. Took one step further away from the label that society put on this animal and started referring to it by a relatively unique physical characteristic. He gets some points for that. I named mine Moükana. I called him Mü for short. Now, I know what you’re asking. How does this 12 year old boy living in New Jersey even know about umlauts? I really wasn’t sure for a while. And nobody else in my family knew either. But eventually, in my adulthood, I remembered that I would read the dictionary sometimes when I was a kid. I loved the pronunciation key in particular. So as I would carefully study words and their definitions, these new but somewhat familiar symbols embedded themselves in my brain as well. I guarantee that I was the only with an Iguana named Mü.
After I had started my career as a namer, an old friend from high school reached out to me on LinkedIn. She was quite pleased with where my career took me, and she reminded me of an experience she and I shared during a free period our junior year. We were having a pretty precocious conversation that was entrepreneurial in nature and she was going to launch a fragrance line under her name. Carolyn Demisch didn’t quite ring with the right tone for my taste, so I proposed Carla Dem. A unique abstraction that’s tonally appropriate for an industry and is aware of its audiences.
So as you can see, names are always on my mind.