Seriously why don’t these Chinese companies hire someone for 30mins to come up with a more reputable sounding name?
They basically hoped that vendors would respond by going through the enormous effort to get a high-value trademark for something like a "Quality Appliances" brand, expending an enormous amount of discovery and legal fees (or just being a pre-existing well-known brand like KitchenAid[TM] or General Electric[TM]. That trademark would be so valuable that they would never risk importing lead-contaminated aluminum cookware and tarnishing their image, they'd implement strict quality control, fight back against counterfeiters using their likeness, and otherwise be a reliable vendor for Amazon. Right?
Wrong. It's basically free and instant to file for a trademark for CHUKOFAZ[TM] kitchen products, because it's not a word or even a substring of a word that anyone would want to trademark. So the vendors did that, submitted their valid trademark for CHUKOFAZ[TM] to the Amazon Brand Registry, and imported the cheapest junk that they could build. And then consumers sorted by "price low to high" and a bought CHUKOFAZ mixer instead of KitchenAid, and raged at Amazon and the CPSC, because the CHUKOFAZ brand had ceased to exist, and the product page they'd bought from was now a HAKLBUC-brand backpack with 2500 5-star reviews praising how well it mixed cookie dough.
Hell, I'd probably buy a Zolimo Barbertron just FOR the name!
Even more modern company names are kinda like that... Anker, DJI, Haier, Dalian Wanda, Kagi, Vercel, Nexon, Plex, Splunk, Zyxel, Sonos, Zynga, Hulu, Etsy, Yandex...
Maybe if they just used a better random name generator with a better appreciation for English phonemes, we'd never know the difference lol.
Lenovo - the new thing; Asus, Volvo - vaguely anatomical in English, but actually from pegasus and "I roll" in Latin; Nintendo - 任天堂 might mean something in Japanese; Samsung - 삼성/三星 "three stars" in Korean; IKEA - IK is from founder Ingvar Kamprad's initials, EA more obscurely from his home farm and village;
Anker - big and heavy "anchor", appropriate for power adapters; Kagi - means "key" in Japanese; Nexon - from Nexus, their (still running!) 1996 MMORPG; Plex - from multiplex or cineplex; Sonos - from sound; Hulu - sounds like "hula" but apparently from Mandarin; Etsy - from "etc.", implying you can find "everything else"; Yandex - Yet Another + (network) Index.
They seem to be fairly sensible names for the most part.
These all started as the equivalent of Amazon brands and went legit after getting a reputation for relative quality. Anker especially
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Group
Edit: Actually, I don't think DJI and Haier were Amazon brands either. DJI was bootstrapped by a college kid's family after transitioning from selling electronic parts. Haier was in SE Asia before the US.
Anker was though. Along with Aukey, RavPower, Mpow... some of those were eventually kicked off though, I think.
Please don't use LLMs to post on here. There need to be at least a minimum of truth or facts when posting.
Back in 2000/1, I had such trouble taking them seriously, with that name and that colourful logo, I was like, whuuuut? But then I started using it and obviously it was miles ahead of everything else. That taught me a good lesson on whether you need a clever brand name or not. The product makes the brand name, not the other way around.
(These days he would probably get reported to HR.)
Imagine applying to Amazon US with a "General Electronics" brand of stoves. It wouldn't up them to decide if they get a listing or not on the site.
I believe there was a youtube minidoc from the wendover productiont type channel on this.
OR, they don't care.... American centrism on HN is so bad
Different cultures regard different things as professional.
> Small brands capitalized on the market’s transition from 2G to 3G/4G, benefitting from strong entry-tier demand, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
this is not a net plus game. Catering to Americans might mean catering less to other cultures.
Hmm.
In particular, check out numbers 5, 20, 29, 32-36, and very specifically, number 40, should interest you. (See 24-27 if you take umbrage at the applicability of the previous set of rules.)
* https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
> 8. People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
Pirahã are an example, they change their names at whim and everyone else accepts this.