The true story behind the names of the 25 best-known brands

LifestyleTribute to first love, the initials of some dogs, nods to exotic fruits... This is what you really mean when you say these brands.

By Raquel Pineiro

There are the simple acronyms of the names of its founders, but there is also room to remember a place, a person or even a beloved pet. The names of some of the most popular companies hide a great story behind them.

The person responsible for making us familiar with a lot of Nordic cities, Ingvar Kamprad, named his furniture company with his initials (I-K), and in a sentimental twist, added the initial of the farm where he grew up , Elmtaryd, and that of his parish, Agunnaryd, in what was then one of the poorest areas of Sweden. All unpronounceable for us.

Amancio Ortega had 'Zorba' in mind, like the movie Zorba, the Greek, but the name was already registered in La Coruña. So, playing with words, he came up with the name with which he conquered the world. Of course, Inditex is a much more sober acronym for 'Textile Design Industry'.

The candy company is named for combining the first letters of the name of its creator, Hans Riegel, and the name of the German city where the factory was located, Bonn.

In 1935 César Rodríguez bought a tailor shop founded in 1890 with that name, an obvious reference to the classic London tailor shop on Savile Road. The rest is history.

Created in 1947, the original company was called 'Hennes,' which means “for her” in Swedish. It was indeed a store where only women's clothing was sold. Twenty-one years later, its owners associated with businessman Mauritz Widforss and renamed the company Hennes & Mauritz, whose shortened name is the one we all know by now.

The sum of the first letters of the surnames of its founders –Pere Carbó, Jaume Prat and Josep Botet– baptizes the popular supermarket chain of Catalan origin.

Of course, in Japanese everything means something and often seems to be part of a haiku. Mixture of the ideograms “responsibility”, “heaven” and “temple”, its mixture could mean something as poetic as “let heaven decide” or perhaps some incomprehensible Japanese concept for our decadent western spirits.

The popular mountain boots respond to the affectionate nickname of Mercedes, the Galician wife of a Catalan textile engineer who found the ideal material to create resistant and comfortable soles in the fuselage of a plane shot down during the First World War.

Yahoos are characters imagined by Jonathan Swift in his novel Gulliver's Travels, monstrous and dirty humans who horrified the civilized and quasi-perfect Houyhnhnms horses. The name would be a humorous and slightly snobbish reference to the Stanford students who created the company.

The first industrial yogurt in Europe was created in Barcelona in 1919 by Isaac Carasso, a Sephardic Jew who fled from Greece, who chose the diminutive name of his son Daniel for his brand.

What better name for a sportswear company than Athena Nike, the Greek goddess of Victory?

Isak Andic remembered the name of an exotic fruit, almost unknown in Spain, that he had tried on a trip to the Philippines when he had to name his newborn clothing store in 1984.

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The search engine gets its name from 'googol', a concept created in the 1930s to define a number made up of 1 followed by 100 zeros.

There are few left who do not know how to translate at least these two German terms: vokswagen means “the people's car”, pure fascist dialectic promoted by Hitler in 1937.

The daughter of Emil Jellinek, one of the pioneers of the automobile industry, would end up baptizing one of the most emblematic car brands.

The classic train of the Spanish railways is an acronym for 'Goicoechea Oriol Light Articulated Train', by the designer Alejandro Goicoechea and the financier José Luis Oriol.

The initials that are on all the zippers we go up and down in our lives correspond to Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha –in Spanish, Yoshida Manufacturing Company–, created in Tokyo in 1934 by Tadao Yoshida.

Adolfo Domínguez's nieces were sentimental when naming their company: the names of their dogs, together, were original and sounded good. The icon of the brand is still a greyhound.

The world's most famous drink competition gets its name from pepsin, a digestive enzyme that its creator claimed to add to the original recipe.

This is how they tell us: “What does the name mean? You see, WhatsApp is a pun on the phrase What's Up, in case you hadn't noticed."

The canvas shoes that have worn several generations of Spaniards received their name in homage to the first –and apparently only– love of their creator, Gregorio Jiménez from La Rioja. It was in 1915 and the couple had been married for a year.

The most popular children's building blocks are an abbreviation of the Danish words 'leg godt', which means 'play well'.

'Natural', 'Old' and 'Sweet' are the adjectives selected by Manuel and Lourdes Díaz del Río, the creators of this meat products company born in the fifties.

The name of the political party was a gift from Fernando Beltrán, a specialist in naming who is behind the names of companies such as Faunia, Amena or Rastreator.

Unexpectedly, the popular ice cream brand is not a union of the last names of its founders or any bucolic German town. It does not mean anything. The name was coined in New York by Rose, the wife of Polish immigrant Reuben Mattus, who in the 1960s was looking for something that sounded vaguely "European" and "Scandinavian."

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