Some companies spend ages pondering the name of their brand. Others seem to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
That’s apparent from The New York Times’s fascinating review of the wild world of Amazon’s pseudo-brands.
Bezos’s Big Boutique is bustling with barely decipherable brand names like BSTOEM, MZOO, and SHSTFD. (Just us, or does that last one sound a little too much like SHTFCD?).
They’re popping up everywhere on Amazon’s third-party marketplace.
One brand, called FRETREE, hawks water jugs and inflatable hammocks. Its trademark is linked to an address at a business park in Shenzhen, China.
For these overseas vendors, branding takes a back seat to selling.
The weird names might sound like an accident, but their success isn’t. That often depends on getting the approval of Amazon’s Brand Registry, which helps companies protect themselves from fraudsters.
There’s another reason why these oddball names are taking off: If nothing else, they’re unique. So they sometimes have an easier path to approval.
The US Patent and Trademark Office tried to stem the tidal wave by requiring all applicants to be represented by a lawyer licensed in the US. That led to a spike in applications before the deadline, followed by a decline.