For a Swede it must seem kind of strange to understand the product names. You see an ACORN toy, a NIGEL bookshelf, and the CROYDON sofa... which sounds like it belongs in a council estate flat. Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?
You have a point but in Branding, it is accepted that bold (noisy) and distinctive (rather than only descriptive) names are an advantage: Creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adyIaTopO6g&t=610 (Jun 2025).
> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö I always thought it's just a natural consequence of using Swedish language, turns out it's on purpose!
Swedish does naturally use a lot of letters with umlauts (e.g. a common plural suffix -är), so a noun with a special letter is usually not hard to come by, and looks more Swedish (than, say, Dutch or English, which are sort of cousin languages).
For a Swede it must seem kind of strange to understand the product names. You see an ACORN toy, a NIGEL bookshelf, and the CROYDON sofa... which sounds like it belongs in a council estate flat. Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?
its not all that strange tbh - im learning danish which is adjacent enough to swedish that I can understand most of the names - sometimes they aren't relevant to the product function, sometimes they are, but they're just names. Is it strange to you that the word "photoshop" uses english language? what about a Hamburger being named after a place?
Nitpicking but your examples all have a clear etymology that may even help you deduce the purpose of a thing.
Hamburger means 'from Hamburg' and can be short for 'in the style of Hamburg', which sounds perfectly normal to a native. This is, would I say, less strange than if it was named 'Hamburg', which seems to be the case of IKEA furniture.
Photoshop, in the same way, seems to refer to a photo workshop, which once again has an etymology, as it refers to the initial purpose of that program, reworking pictures.
On the opposite, if things are just named 'for the lulz', and my desk is called Boston, my text editor 'golden retriever' and my lamp acorn, confusion may at some point arise.
For a Swede it must seem kind of strange to understand the product names. You see an ACORN toy, a NIGEL bookshelf, and the CROYDON sofa... which sounds like it belongs in a council estate flat. Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?
> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö Yes, but why prefer these letters? I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?
I guess it helps with emphasizing their Swedish identity, which is one of their goals with naming. Doesn't gel too well with "feels good to say" for a non-native speaker, but I see their point.
For a Swede it must seem kind of strange to understand the product names. You see an ACORN toy, a NIGEL bookshelf, and the CROYDON sofa... which sounds like it belongs in a council estate flat. Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?
If the goal is something that reads weird for most Europeans, then try picking names from Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, or Welsh.
My missus is Hungarian, I'm sure it's a lovely language but it just sounds like Klingon to me.
Which makes it hilarious when she's annoyed at the boy.
Amazing. A post asks a question in the title that I actually want answered, and then goes on to answer that question clearly and succinctly. Maybe the best corporate content I've seen this year.
May I introduce you to the UK chain Iceland and their stance on management consultants? https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/beware-m...