The naming list was longer than I expected it to be. I had assumed that the name would come relatively quickly once we decided what we were building, that the concept was clear enough that the name would present itself as the obvious expression of the concept.
The concept was clear. The name was not obvious. The list grew across the first weeks of January and February 2024 as the four of us generated options independently and shared them in the group and eliminated them for reasons that ranged from the already-registered to the inadvertently comic to the accurate-but-wrong in the way that a description can be accurate and still be the wrong name.
There were the nautical references, the names drawn from the classical navigation vocabulary that every sailing brand reaches for and that we rejected because we did not want to be in the category of every sailing brand. There were the Polynesian and Maori and Pacific island words that we explored more seriously, because the Pacific is the heart of the circumnavigation and the Pacific navigational tradition is the tradition that the Naora voyage most closely honours in its ambition.
Most of these were already registered or already in use by brands in adjacent categories. Some of them sounded right in isolation and wrong in combination with .world. The naming process is not romantic. It is the elimination of the wrong options until the right one is visible.
The One That Almost Was
There was one name that came close. I will not give it here because the name is in use by another brand and naming it would be the unintended comparison. But the name that almost was the name was close in the right direction, it carried the Pacific navigational reference and it was available as a domain and it was short enough to work as a brand mark. We sat with it for approximately a week.
Then Antony found Naora and put it in the group and we sat with that instead and within forty-eight hours the conversation about the other name had stopped because Naora was not the better option in a comparative sense. It was the right name in the absolute sense. The other name was good. Naora was ours.
The naming process taught me something that the concept development process also teaches, which is that the right answer does not always arrive as the obvious answer. Sometimes it arrives as the last answer standing after the wrong ones have been eliminated. Naora was the last name standing. It has been the right name every day since.
