Catchword

In short

Catchword has named companies and products since 1998, from offices in Oakland and on Madison Avenue in New York, and is women-owned. The bench is unusual for the field: a staff linguist, screening specialists, a domain-name strategist and, more recently, design directors, as it has grown from a naming boutique into a broader branding firm. It counts more than 1,500 projects and 750 clients, and sits at #2 on our naming ranking.

Asana is the name it is best known for: the Sanskrit word for a yoga pose, picked for a productivity platform when competitors leaned descriptive, and easy to pronounce in nearly any language. For Adobe it named Photoshop Elements, and the Elements tag later spread to Acrobat and Premiere. The American Red Cross got hundreds of tagline options for an emergency-preparedness campaign. Vudu, Upwork and the Volkswagen Atlas also appear on its timeline.

Startups through Fortune 500 companies that need a name to survive linguistic, cultural and trademark checks, or a naming system across a product portfolio, fit Catchword well, and it can now carry the work into a logo and visual identity, as its 2026 awards for Macmillan Learning's identity redesign show. A company that also needs a website or digital product built will still have to hire a separate web or product team for that part.