15 Forgotten Original Names of Famous Businesses
Most companies today wear their brand names like second skin — so naturally that it’s hard to imagine them as anything else. But behind every household name sits a discarded identity, a first draft that got crossed out along the way to success.
These original names reveal something fascinating about the messy, uncertain process of building a business. They’re snapshots of companies before they knew who they’d become.
Blue Ribbon Sports
Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman weren’t thinking about swooshes when they started their athletic shoe company in 1964. Blue Ribbon Sports sold Japanese running shoes out of Knight’s car at track meets across Oregon.
The name sounded official enough for a business that was anything but — just two guys who believed American runners deserved better footwear. It wasn’t until 1971 that they rebranded as Nike, borrowing the name from the Greek goddess of victory and commissioning that famous logo for a grand total of $35.
J. and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web
Yahoo started as exactly what its original name suggested — two Stanford graduate students cataloging interesting websites they’d found while procrastinating on their engineering studies. J. Yang and David Filo never intended to build an empire; they just wanted to organize the chaos of the early internet for their own use.
So their hand-curated directory grew (because the web kept growing), attracting visitors who appreciated having someone else sort through the digital wilderness, until the whole thing became unwieldy enough that a proper company name seemed necessary — and “Yahoo” (allegedly standing for “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle,” though that always felt like a backronym) had a better ring than introducing yourself as J. and David every time someone asked what you did for work.
AuctionWeb
Before eBay became the place where you could buy anything from vintage baseball cards to someone’s childhood memories, Pierre Omidyar ran a simple auction site from his personal webpage. AuctionWeb launched in 1995 as part of a larger site called eBay.com — except eBay stood for Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar’s consulting firm.
When he tried to register echobay.com for the business, the domain was already taken by Echo Bay Mines. So he shortened it to eBay, and the auction site eventually swallowed its parent company’s identity whole.
Quantum Computer Services
The internet feels inevitable now, but in 1985, most people had never heard the word “online.” Steve Case and his partners at Quantum Computer Services were trying to bring computer networking to regular households — not just tech enthusiasts with expensive equipment.
They started with services for specific computer brands: Q-Link for Commodore users, AppleLink for Mac owners. The company name sounded serious and technical because that’s what seemed necessary to get taken seriously.
America Online didn’t emerge until 1989, when they realized their service needed a name that regular people could understand and remember.
Cadabra
Jeff Bezos almost named his online bookstore after a magic word. Cadabra.com was registered and ready to launch when his lawyer pointed out a problem during a phone call — it sounded too much like “cadaver.” People might think they were ordering from a morgue instead of a bookstore.
Bezos went back to his list of potential names and landed on Amazon, reasoning that it was the world’s largest river and he wanted to build the world’s largest bookstore. The magic word domain still redirects to Amazon today, a reminder of how close the company came to a very different identity.
Backrub
Google’s original name makes perfect sense once someone explains it, which is exactly why it had to change. Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their search engine Backrub because it analyzed “back links” — the connections between websites that helped determine which pages were most relevant and trustworthy. The name was technically accurate but utterly forgettable, the kind of thing that worked fine in academic papers but died on the tongue in casual conversation.
Google, derived from “googol” (the number 1 followed by 100 zeros), captured what they were really doing: organizing an impossibly vast amount of information. Sometimes the better name isn’t the more accurate one — it’s the one that sticks.
The Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg’s social network started with a definite article that made it sound like a specific thing rather than a general concept. “The Facebook” felt institutional, like “the yearbook” or “the directory” — which matched its original purpose as a digital version of the printed facebook directories that colleges gave to incoming students.
Dropping “the” was more than a branding decision; it signaled that this wasn’t just replacing an existing campus tradition but creating something entirely new. Sometimes a small word carries more weight than anyone realizes.
Guide to the World Wide Web
Wait — this one seems familiar, but it’s not the same. Before Yahoo’s J. Yang was cataloging websites, another J. was doing something similar. J. Pournelle, a science fiction writer and computer columnist, created one of the early web directories. His guide never grew into a major business, but it shows how many people were trying to solve the same problem in the early days of the internet.
The web was growing faster than anyone could track, and everyone with a little technical knowledge thought they might be the one to organize it all.
Sound of Music
Best Buy started as a single audio equipment store in Minnesota, and its original name reflected that narrow focus perfectly. Richard Schulze and his business partner opened Sound of Music in 1966, selling stereos and speakers to music enthusiasts who cared about sound quality.
The name worked fine for one store, but it became a limitation as they expanded into televisions, computers, and other electronics. Best Buy emerged in 1983 after a tornado destroyed their main store and insurance money allowed them to rebuild with a broader vision.
Sometimes disaster forces the evolution that success might have delayed.
Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo
Sony’s original name translates to “Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation,” which tells you everything and nothing about what the company would become. Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka founded the company in 1946 to repair radios and build electronics for the Japanese market.
The name was functional but impossible for international customers to remember or pronounce. Sony, derived from the Latin word “sonus” (sound) combined with “sonny” (a term for bright young men), was chosen specifically for global appeal.
The founders understood that breaking into international markets required more than good products — it required a name that worked in any language.
Pete’s Super Submarines
Subway’s original name came from its founder’s first name and a promise about sandwich size. Fred DeLuca opened his first sandwich shop in 1965 with a $1,000 loan from family friend Peter Buck — hence “Pete’s.”
The focus was on submarine sandwiches made large enough to satisfy college students and working people looking for substantial meals. But “Pete’s” created confusion about who actually owned the business, and “Super Submarines” was too long for signs and advertising. Subway captured the core concept while solving practical problems.
Good branding often comes down to making things easier for customers to remember and repeat.
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company
IBM’s original name reads like a government form — technically accurate but completely forgettable. The company formed in 1911 through a merger of three businesses that made scales, time clocks, and punch card machines for data processing.
Each word described something they actually did, which made the name truthful but clunky. International Business Machines, adopted in 1924, was both more ambitious and more memorable.
It suggested global reach and positioned the company as serving all kinds of businesses, not just the few that needed tabulating equipment. Sometimes the best name describes not what you are, but what you want to become.
Brad’s Drink
Pepsi started life as a pharmacy concoction created by pharmacist Caleb Bradham in 1893. He called it Brad’s Drink and served it at his drugstore soda fountain in New Bern, North Carolina.
The beverage was supposed to aid digestion and boost energy — typical claims for pharmacy drinks of that era. Bradham renamed it Pepsi-Cola in 1898, combining “pepsin” (a digestive enzyme) with “cola” to indicate its caffeine content.
The new name suggested both health benefits and taste, which proved more marketable than simply naming it after its creator.
Marafuku Company
Nintendo’s original business had nothing to do with video games or even electronics. Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company in 1889 to manufacture hanafuda, traditional Japanese playing cards used for gambling.
Marafuku roughly translated to “luck of hemp” and referenced the material used to make the cards. The name worked fine for a local card company but meant nothing to international customers when Nintendo expanded into toys, then arcade games, then home video game systems.
Nintendo, which can be interpreted as “leave luck to heaven,” proved both more memorable and more adaptable as the company reinvented itself multiple times over more than a century.
Relentless
Amazon wasn’t Jeff Bezos’s only name choice that raised eyebrows. Before settling on the river-inspired brand, he seriously considered Relentless.com for his online bookstore.
The name captured his business philosophy — relentless focus on customer service and selection. It was memorable and aggressive, suggesting a company that wouldn’t give up or compromise.
But it also sounded slightly threatening, more like a military operation than a friendly place to buy books. Bezos registered the domain anyway, and it still redirects to Amazon today.
Sometimes the name that captures your internal drive isn’t the one that makes customers comfortable.
Names That Almost Were
The stories behind these forgotten names reveal something important about building a business: most founders don’t start with perfect clarity about what they’re creating. They begin with functional names that describe their immediate reality — selling athletic shoes, organizing websites, serving sandwiches.
The memorable brands emerge later, after the businesses discover who they really are and who they want to serve. Perhaps that’s the most human part of these corporate origin stories: they remind us that even the most successful companies started with someone making their best guess about what to call themselves, then figuring out the rest as they went along.
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