Naming is the part of a project clients worry about most and enjoy least. It’s also where we spend more time than anyone expects. For Mossa, the brief was short: a skincare range made from moss, from northern Sweden, sold mostly outside it.

The long list

We started with around four hundred candidates. Latin plant names, Sámi words, invented words and a few that only made sense to us at six in the evening. Most were cut for being hard to say in English or German, which mattered because that’s where most of the customers would be.

Two rounds of trademark searches took the list from forty to nine. Several of our favourites already belonged to cosmetics brands in Korea, which was humbling.

The short answer

Mossa came from the founders’ grandmother, who used it as a nickname for anything soft and green. It was on the list from the first day and we kept skipping past it because it seemed too obvious. In the end it was the only name that people could say, remember and spell after hearing it once.