The name was the second hardest thing about starting the company. The hardest was deciding to start at all; the second hardest was working out what to call it. Everything else was easier than the name.
That sounds dramatic, but the people who've named businesses know what I mean. The name lives on every email, every invoice, every conversation. If it's wrong, you live with the wrongness for years. If it's right, it does free work for you forever — it tells customers something about who you are before you've said a word.
This piece is a short note on what "ThemeSmith" is doing, what it isn't, and the names I considered and rejected.
What the name is doing
"ThemeSmith" is a compound. Theme — like a website theme, like the WordPress era we all worked through, like a unifying register. Smith — like blacksmith, silversmith, gunsmith, cabinetmaker. Someone who shapes a material into a working object using fire, hammer, and patience.
The compound is doing two jobs:
- It tells you what the company makes — themes, websites, the visual register of a small business online.
- It tells you how the company makes them — by a craft tradition, with care, slowly enough to do it right.
The second job is the more important one. There were a thousand names available that would have told you what we make. ThemeForge. Brandly. PageStudio. Sitecraft.ai. Most of them were taken; some of them were available. The names I rejected nearly all failed on the how axis — they suggested speed, automation, scale, modernity, but not craft. Not the workshop. Not the hammer.
I wanted "smith" because the smith register is the right one for the work. We're not a factory. We're not a marketplace. We're a workshop. The dispatch desk metaphor that runs through everything else on the marketing site comes from the smith metaphor. A desk is a workshop. The kettle is on. The work goes out at editorial quality.
What "ThemeSmith" isn't
A few things the name deliberately isn't:
It isn't shouting future-tech. The brand mark is just ThemeSmith — one word, no “.ai” in the wordmark, no “Labs”, no “X”. The legal entity is Themesmith.AI Ltd and the website is themesmith.ai because that's how the domain registration worked out — but the brand-form people read on every page is the unsuffixed one. Our customers are small businesses, not VCs; the .ai stays where it has to (Companies House, the URL bar) and the brand stays where the customer sees it.
That deliberate split — legal-form has the suffix, brand-form doesn't — is something I think more companies should do. The .ai or .io or .app TLD is a registrar artefact; it doesn't have to be the name you walk around saying. Plenty of brands do this: Stripe answers to stripe.com, but its company is Stripe Inc; its domain is incidental to the wordmark. The brand is what gets remembered, not the URL.
It isn't an aspiration name. It's not "Aspire" or "Elevate" or "Ascend" or one of the thousand names that try to be inspirational without anchoring to anything specific. Those names are noisy. They tell you nothing. They're equally well-suited to a software company and a yoga studio.
It isn't an abstraction. It's not "Mode" or "Form" or "Field" or a single-word noun gesturing at importance. Those names are fine for some companies — Stripe and Linear earned theirs — but they require you to do the work of telling the customer what you do. We didn't want to spend that much marketing budget explaining the name.
It isn't a person's name. It's not "Painter & Sons" or "Chris Painter Studio". I came close to that — there's a real argument for naming the company after the person doing the work, especially when the company is one person — but I wanted the company to have a slightly larger feel than "Chris's website business", and a personal name pins you to a particular operator forever. What if I want to hire someone?
Names I rejected
For the record, the longlist that didn't make it:
- ThemeForge — close. The forge metaphor is right. But "forge" had the disadvantage of being the name of our editorial assistant tool inside the platform, and we wanted those things to be different words.
- Sitecraft — almost. "Craft" is on-brand. But "Site" is a generic word and the compound felt slightly bland.
- Workbench — strong on the workshop register. Felt too tied to a specific furniture metaphor.
- The Dispatch Desk — I considered it as the actual company name. Decided it worked better as the internal metaphor for how the work is described, rather than the brand name. Now lives as a tagline.
- Marlow & Vine — invented for an early demo (see the homepage). Too much like an actual small business name; would have created confusion.
- Studio Painter — the "personal name" route. Rejected for the reasons above.
- Bench Co — workshop-y but vague. Too many "Co" companies already.
- Ledger — I love this name, but it's too accounting-flavoured.
- Quartermaster — military-naval register. Too off-piste from the editorial-warm register we wanted.
What the name does for us now
A year in (writing this in May 2026, with the company incorporated December 2025), the name has held up. Customers reading the marketing site grasp that we're a craft service before we say so. The dispatch desk language extends naturally — Form 01: Brief Receipt, Issue 01 of the Quarterly, Dossier № 042 for Site Rescue. The whole brand register sits comfortably on top of the smith / desk metaphor.
I'm sure in five years there'll be edges to the name I'd file off if I were starting again. Every name has those. What matters is that the name works in the small daily uses — the email signature, the invoice, the conversation at a dinner party where someone asks what you do — and "ThemeSmith" works.
It also has the practical virtue of being available across the surfaces a small company needs: themesmith.ai, the company name at Companies House (Themesmith.AI Ltd, № 16926973), the Twitter handle (@themesmith_ai), the LinkedIn page. Naming a company in 2026 is partly an inventory check of which versions of your preferred name are taken on which platforms; we got reasonably lucky.
The note for anyone naming a small business
The advice that helped me, distilled: find the metaphor first, then find a word that contains the metaphor.Don't start by listing words you like. Start by working out what register you want the company to sit in. Workshop or factory? Magazine or app? Ledger or spreadsheet? Quietly competent, or brashly fast?
Once the register is clear, the name almost falls out. You're not naming the company; you're finding the word that already names it.
The wrong way to do it is to brainstorm words you like and try to pick one. That gets you "Mode" and "Field" and a hundred other abstract single-noun names that are correct but not yours. The right way is to know the metaphor first, then the word arrives.
For us the metaphor was a workshop with a kettle on. The word that contained it was Smith. The compound did the rest.