Ever wondered how salons get their names? How does an owner decide whether or not to name the salon after him or herself? Are there certain names to steer clear of?

We talked to seven owners to get the skinny on how they came up with their salons’ names. Read on for their unique stories about naming their “baby.”

“Things didn’t end well with our former partner and he opened a new salon with the same name,” says Adam Wright, Dream State Salons co-owner. “We came to realize if we really want to transform our culture and be more than just a fabulous salon we needed to rebrand.”

“We wanted a name to reflect our values. For the first month, we played with ideas, and wanted to go back to the very heart of Aveda. Very early on, we used to sing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ at every gathering … ‘life is but a dream.’

“Dream State emerged from that. The image we started from was a balloon, not a kite (the current logo). You have a sense of wonder a child would feel when a balloon floated away and you saw how big the sky was,” he adds.

“Dream State fits for creative people as well. Katie (Adam’s sister and co-owner) and I sketched out the logo in an evening. After three months of thinking, it all came to us in a weekend.”

Katie adds “We were all about helping people find their own dreams and giving them a place to think, work and do all the things that were inside of them. We believe in the state of dreaming and living your dream.”

Clients love the name, too. “It’s amazing how it means something different to each of our clients. Sometimes they’ll even say, ‘I’m in a dream state as they are getting a scalp massage.’”

Owner Luca Boccia says, “We always love the word ‘pure.’ But we didn’t want the traditional spelling, so we thought, who is this all about?” The answer was the client or YOU.

“When people ask where we got the name, we say it’s all about YOU. We threw the letter ‘y’ in there to represent that.”

“The name was a long process,” says owner Susan Haise. “In 1993 we opened as The Skin Institute & Day Spa, but shortly thereafter we opened our school and the need to change the name arose. We asked for input from our guests, which we later found needed to be a bit more structured as we received a lot of ideas that didn’t correspond with what we did but rather the location.

“So I picked up the phone and called David Wagner in Minneapolis who recently had transitioned the Horst & Friends Salons to Juut for advice and he told me to keep the name short and to read ‘22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.’

“From there we defined our brand, and since we use essential oils in all of our services it became a natural avenue to look at for name ideas. Neroli (an essential oil distilled from the flowers of the Seville orange) stood out as no other company had that name and it coincided with who we are and what we do.

“We then proposed two name options to our guests and allowed them to choose. Neroli was the dominant winner and from there we further defined the name with ‘salon & spa’ to ensure a clear communication to consumers as to what type of business we were.”

“We thought it was such a great name because in Italian, the word means new, fresh and innovative,” says co-owner Terrence McKee. “At the time, my business partner was Italian. My new partner (James Amato for 20 years now) is also Italian. It said a lot about what we were and was one word and easy to say.”

Or so they thought. “We did an entire TV commercial on how our name is pronounced,” says McKee, after clients kept mispronouncing it. “’Nuvo,’ ‘Nuavo,’ ‘Novo’—we made every pronunciation and then said it correctly (nu-ovo).

“We turned something that was a challenge into an opportunity.”

“I’ve always been connected to branding and the importance of branding,” says owner Bryan Nunes. “We needed a name people would get excited about. At the time we were a two-chair studio, so we were always asking clients what they thought we should name the salon.

“One day a client said, ‘It’s too bad about all the other meanings of the word ‘blow.’ Now it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but we were the only ones who used it in 2004.

“We invested in a logo and business card before we even had a location. As for the website name, ‘blo’ wasn’t available. So I capitalized on something I always said to clients. They would say, ‘I go to Blo salon, which I hated, and would reply, ‘It’s just Blo.’”

And justblo.com was born. Then, when Apple created .me, Nunes took it one step further. “Our blog will launch at justblo.me.”

“When it was time to open the salon up, I was 25 and pretty new,” says owner Van Council. “My younger brother Michael was my partner, and at that time, it seemed like that was the thing to do. Also, it was a play off of Van Gogh and Van Halen.

“All the big ones used their names—Jamison Shaw, Vidal Sassoon, Toni & Guy. That was really my thinking. It has kind of changed now that I own a lot of salons. Eventually, if you want to sell, having your name on the salon could pose a problem.”

“When I opened my first salon, it was called Salon Salon,” says owner David Wagner. “Then I bought Horst, and then I bought Yosh. So I had Horst in Midwest and Yosh in San Francisco. Then Estée Lauder bought Aveda.

“People thought the salons were Elizabeth Arden. So we did focus groups with guests and asked them what the essence of the salon is. One guest said she goes to the salon to get her bucket filled.

“So we took the word ‘fill’ and found Juuten, the Japenese word which means fill. From there we found Juut, which means to uplift humanity and serve others. It was trademarkable, and the dotcom was available.”

Wagner emphasizes the importance of owning your salon name. “So many salon owners don’t own their own name,” he says. “Without going through the legal process of obtaining/owning the name, you can’t build your brand. We went into ‘Juut’ knowing it had to be owned by us and usable for e-commerce, etc. I own probably 50 dotcoms with prospective names.”