How Should You Name Your Handmade Crafts?

I often receive questions about how handmade items should be named. There are a few important reasons to come up with unique names for each of your designs. Here are some things to consider:

A name that you come up with could eventually be considered a brand. Instead of calling their blanket a “blanket with sleeves”, one smart company branded it the Snuggie and now everyone knows what it is. It takes time and a lot of marketing before a brand name will be synonymous with an item. It will definitely make you stand out above the competition though as you get recognized.

If you have a lot of handmade items, coming up with great unique names can really be a challenge. Eventually you may run out of ideas. Artists name their paintings but they usually only do so many per year. If you are an avid creator with hundreds of new versions of designs, consider a more simple approach.

If you have a few designs that are similar, group them into a series. The series could have the unique name. Each design in that series could be identified by a letter or letter and number combination. This works great when you have a lot of variations of an item but all of them can fit under one specific category.

Consider SEO, search engine optimization, when giving your handmade items a title. When you first start out no one will recognize your brand name. People will be finding you by searching and using words that describe what they are looking for. Use your brand name at the end of the item titles and put the descriptive keywords at the beginning. The first words carry more weight from an SEO perspective. The same thing goes for naming the categories on your website and for the photo file names.

If someone sees one of your handmade handbags on the street for example and they want to search online to find one for themselves they will probably simply search by using descriptive terms. Even if they ask the person with the handbag what it is called, they may not remember the unique brand name later on when they get to the computer. In this case using keywords followed by a brand name for your handbag title would give you a good chance of this prospective customer finding your site.

From an organizational standpoint, having a unique tag on each of your handmade items is really necessary. When a customer asks you a question about a particular item they will need a way to identify the exact item they are referring to. If each of your items has a different name that will work great. If you name each series make sure that each item in the series has a number or number and letter. Ex: 1A, 43B, etc.

Items without brand names usually just have descriptive titles and a lot of them will be nearly identical except for the “43B” at the end. If you do not put this you can go back and forth with your customer for a few minutes trying to determine whether you two are talking about the same item. When you save your item photos on your computer you can simply create a folder named “43B”. As you get more and more handmade items, organizing them becomes an issue. Start identifying them correctly from the start to make your life much easier.

Richard

Tags: name, naming, naming crafts, naming handmade items