Good morning/afternoon/night, As I've said before in a thread about a 60s dress, I plan on starting my online store on eBay and now am facing one of the hardest parts of it: the need to choose a name. I've some ideas, organized by inspiration, as listed below: Music inspired: Be My Vintage – From “Be My Baby”, by The Ronettes. Oh, Pretty Vintage – From Oh, Pretty Woman, by Roy Orbison. Food inspired: Splum Vintage – from the sugar-free diet drops Rhyming: Fix These Sixties - tested it in one word, too many 'x's. Clothing styles: Go-go Vintage Slang from the '50s and '60s: Apple Butter Vintage – Smooth talk or flattery. Hubba Hubba Vintage (or simply Hubba Vintage) – Used to express sexual approval. Cubic Vintage (from slang 'Cube') – A normal person. Spaz Vintage – Someone who is uncoordinated. A klutz. Klutz Vintage – Same as above. Neato Vintage – Very cool or good, sometimes used with “keeno”. Peepers Vintage – Glasses. Any opinions are appreciated. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Update: Removed all of the taken usernames. Some of them were my strongest choices :(
I bet you'll find many of those names are taken. I don't know about eBay stores - but doesn't your eBay user name have to be one word?
It does have to be one word. But, for an example, if I decide to use 'Apple Butter Vintage', the username would read 'applebuttervintage'. Thanks for the heads up about many of the names being taken. I'll start checking them up.
I find California Vintage to be the most memorable -- assuming that it is not already taken. However, before selecting a shop name, I would make sure that the domain name is also available, and then lease it as well.
I like "Neato Vintage"... with the same cautions of checking if it's being used already AND checking if the domain name is available. Or how about "Cool Beans Vintage"?
Actually, there is a Neato Vintage. It was based in Brooklyn, but the store closed and the Twitter and Instagram have been inactive since last year/beginning of this year. The website links to Etsy, but there seems to be an error when accessing it. Note: They sold vintage furniture. Oh, well, it appears it's taken. I like 'Cool Beans', thank you for suggesting!
I was going to ask OP that, too, but when I thought about it, I realized that - if it were me - I'd decide against that name because it sounds limiting. Some shoppers may think that 60s is all you carry. Or is that decade really the majority of what OP does plan to sell?
I work in a hospital and yesterday I gave a bit of good news to a 70-something female patient and she said, "Cool beans!"
My best advice is to choose a name that reflects your style and stock - so anything with a '60s ring (I like Go-Go Vintage best) is great if that's what you do, but not so good if you're all into '30s floral tea gowns. I bought the contents of a shop and they offered to let me use the name 'Albert and Gladys', which would have been wonderful if I was doing '20-50s but I wanted the freedom to do any era I pleased. You might prefer a name that's more generic as it gives you more choice. When I was looking for a name, I did up a poll with all the names I liked and then when the most popular ones were declared, found that I didn't like any of them! Then one day 'Circa' came to me and that was it: the obvious and best choice and I've used it for almost fifteen years now. It's also important to find something that isn't being used but since I opened my shop, found that there were many around the world using the same name (it's a buzzword in the old wares world, part of why I chose it). It hasn't been a problem because they're in different countries so if your preferred name is already taken it's not necessarily a problem. Better to be unique, but someone else might use it any way. It's fun choosing a name. My last bit of advice is to pick one, play with it in your mind for a while, use it in conversations and see how it feels, if it does what you want it to do, before you settle it in, because changing later can be hard.
I also really like this name! It has the connection to the song but also implies ownership, and we all have seen those 'be mine!' items of vintage clothing. But agree with what others have said about checking the name. I went to the british Library to get some help with checking weather the names i wanted were already taken.
