Catchword is a creative agency headquartered in Oakland,

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, with an East Coast office in

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...

. The company provides naming and branding services for companies in the technology, food and beverage, consumer products, financial services, healthcare and automotive industries.

Corporate history

Catchword was founded in May 1998 as a naming agency by Maria Cypher, Laurel Sutton, and Burt Alper. The company initially focused on technology and start-up companies, but later broadened its scope to cover other industries. In January 2001, Mark Skoultchi joined the company to head East Coast operations at its New Jersey office. Since 2014, the company has been headed by Cypher and Skoultchi. In 2022, the company expanded its services and locations to two additional offices in the Denver area and in Calgary, Canada. Catchword is a member of the Global Naming Network, which comprises naming firms from around the world collaborating on creative work and linguistic analysis.

Services

Services offered by Catchword include company and product naming; tagline creation; naming strategy, architecture, and protocol; linguistic analysis; trademark prescreening; naming research; brand strategy and positioning; visual identity design and copywriting. Apart from naming services, Catchword reviews brand names on its website. The company also runs the online site PopNamer, featuring name games in which the general public submits name ideas for trends, social phenomena and existing products and companies. Catchword also operates The Catchword Accelerator, a marketplace for brandable domain names.

Work

Catchword has created notable product and company names such as Refreshers (for

Starbucks Starbucks Corporation is an American multinational List of coffeehouse chains, chain of coffeehouses and Starbucks Reserve, roastery reserves headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It was founded in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gor ...

);

Atlas An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of world map, maps of Earth or of a continent or region of Earth. Advances in astronomy have also resulted in atlases of the celestial sphere or of other planets. Atlases have traditio ...

(for Volkswagen);

Upwork Upwork Inc., formerly Elance-oDesk, is an American freelancing platform headquartered in Santa Clara and San Francisco, California. The company was formed in 2013 as Elance-oDesk after the merger of Elance Inc. and oDesk Corp. The merged compa ...

(for Elance-oDesk); Attain (for

Aetna Aetna Inc. ( ) is an American managed health care company that sells traditional and consumer directed health care insurance and related services, such as medical, pharmaceutical, dental, behavioral health, long-term care, and disability plans, ...

); Fibrance, Valor and ClearCurve (for Corning); GoMotion (for SportsEngine); Optane and Arc (for

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

); Nature's Promise (for

Ahold Koninklijke Ahold N.V. was a Dutch multinational retail company based in Zaandam, Netherlands. Founded in 1887 by Albert Heijn Sr., the company initially began as a single grocery store in Oostzaan and became the largest grocery chain in the ...

); Storyscape (for

FoxNext FoxNext, LLC was a virtual reality and theme park unit of 20th Century Fox, now known as 20th Century Studios. It was established in 2017 prior to Disney's acquisition of Fox and operated under the Disney Parks, Experiences and Products unit of ...

); Charge, Flex, Surge, One, Zip, and Force (for

Fitbit Fitbit is a product lining, line of wireless-enabled wearable technology, physical fitness monitors and activity trackers such as smartwatches, pedometers and monitors for heart rate, quality of sleep, and stairs climbed as well as related soft ...

); Sam '76 (for Boston Beer);

Keysight Keysight Technologies, Inc. is an American company that manufactures electronics test and measurement equipment and software. The name is a blend of ''key'' and ''insight''. The company was formed as a spin-off of Agilent Technologies, which inhe ...

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(spinoff of

Agilent Agilent Technologies, Inc. is an American global company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, that provides instruments, software, services, and consumables for laboratories. Agilent was established in 1999 as a spin-off from Hewlett-Packar ...

); Crazy 8 (for

Gymboree Gymboree is a sub brand of The Children's Place. Gymboree began with operating retail stores between the early 1970s and the later 2010s. It was founded by Joan Barnes. History Early years In 1986, the company opened a chain of clothing stores ...

); Dreamery (for

Dreyer's Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, Inc. (or simply Dreyer's) is an American ice cream company, founded in 1928 in Oakland, California. The company's two signature brands, ''Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream'' and ''Edy's Grand Ice Cream'', are named after its foun ...

); Infusion (for Spalding); Javiva (for

Peet's Coffee & Tea Peet's Coffee is a San Francisco Bay Area-based specialty coffee roaster and retailer owned by Dutch multinational coffee and tea company JDE Peet's. Founded in 1966 by Alfred Peet in Berkeley, California, Peet's introduced the United States to ...

);

Kijiji Kijiji ( , ; ) is a Canadian online classified advertising website. It operates sections for cities and urban regions, for posting local advertisements. Kijiji was launched in February 2005 as an eBay subsidiary under Marktplaats BV Marktplaats ...

(for

eBay eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...

); Snap'd (for Kellogg's Cheez-It brand); Vantara (for Hitachi); Maxify (for

Canon Canon or Canons may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Canon (fiction), the material accepted as officially written by an author or an ascribed author * Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture ** Western canon, th ...

); Relieva and Vuity (for Allergan);

Photoshop Elements Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing, ...

(for

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

);

Asana An āsana (Sanskrit: आसन) is a body posture, originally and still a general term for a sitting meditation pose,Verse 46, chapter II, "Patanjali Yoga sutras" by Swami Prabhavananda, published by the Sri Ramakrishna Math p. 111 and late ...

; Bridgespan Group;

FireEye Trellix (formerly FireEye and McAfee Enterprise) is a privately held cybersecurity company that was founded in 2022. It provides hardware, software, and services to investigate cybersecurity attacks, protect against malicious software, and ana ...

; Medallia, Soluna; Ursa and

Vudu Fandango at Home (formerly known as Vudu) is an American digital video store and streaming service owned by Fandango Media, a joint-venture between NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery. The company offers transactional video on demand re ...

. Catchword's clients include Aetna,

Allergan Allergan plc is an American, Irish-domiciled pharmaceutical company that acquires, develops, manufactures and markets brand name drugs and medical devices in the areas of medical aesthetics, eye care, central nervous system, and gastroenterology. ...

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

AMC Networks AMC Networks Inc. is an American mass media and entertainment corporation headquartered in 11 Penn Plaza, New York City. The company owns and operates the AMC cable channel, BBC America, IFC, Sundance TV, and We TV. It also owns the art ho ...

, Canon USA,

Capital One Capital One Financial Corporation is an American bank holding company founded on July 21, 1994, and specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts, headquartered in Tysons, Virginia, with operations primarily in the ...

, CBRE,

The Clorox Company The Clorox Company (formerly Clorox Chemical Company) is an American multinational manufacturer and marketer of consumer and professional products. As of 2024, the Oakland, California-based company had approximately 8,000 employees worldwide. N ...

, Corning, Dole Foods,

Dunkin' Brands Dunkin' Brands Group, Inc. was an American restaurant holding company that ran three chains of fast food, fast-food restaurants: Dunkin' Donuts, Mister Donut, and Baskin-Robbins. It was headquartered in Canton, Massachusetts. It was acquired by In ...

, Fitbit,

General Motors General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. The company is most known for owning and manufacturing f ...

Hitachi () is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1910 and headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo. The company is active in various industries, including digital systems, power and renewable ener ...

The Home Depot The Home Depot, Inc., often referred to as Home Depot, is an American multinational corporation, multinational home improvement retail corporation that sells tools, construction products, appliances, and services, including fuel and transportat ...

McDonald's McDonald's Corporation, doing business as McDonald's, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational fast food chain store, chain. As of 2024, it is the second largest by number of locations in the world, behind only the Chinese ch ...

PwC PricewaterhouseCoopers, also known as PwC, is a Multinational corporation, multinational professional services network based in London, United Kingdom. It is the second-largest professional services network in the world and is one of the Big Fo ...

, Royal Bank of Canada, Safeway,

SEGA is a Japanese video game company and subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings headquartered in Tokyo. It produces several List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises for arcade game, arcades and video game cons ...

Stack Overflow In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many fa ...

Stryker The Stryker is a family of Eight-wheel drive, eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicles derived from the Canadian LAV III. Stryker vehicles are produced by General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada (GDLS-C) for the United States Army in a plant in L ...

, Tik Tok,

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...

Unilever Unilever PLC () is a British multinational consumer packaged goods company headquartered in London, England. It was founded on 2 September 1929 following the merger of Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie with British soap maker Lever B ...

and

Wells Fargo Bank Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company with a significant global presence. The company operates in 35 countries and serves over 70 million customers worldwide. It is a systemically important fi ...

Awards and recognition

Catchword has also been recognized by Clutch, DesignRush and Influencer Marketing Hub for several years.

References

External links

{{official website, http://catchwordbranding.com Branding companies of the United States Companies based in Oakland, California 1998 establishments in California