Forget Naming Companies – One Teen Is Getting Paid to Name Babies

There was a really cool story on BBC.co.uk that was sent to me by Adam Yamada from Yamada Media.

Domain investors and branding firms spend most of their time selling names or creating names for business, but there is a 16 year old Brit that is making money naming babies.

Beau Jessup is a 16 year old from Gloucestershire who created a website called Special Name, the service helps give Chinese babies, English names.

According to the story, in China it is considered important to have an English name for future study or business with the UK.

From the article:

‘Special Name’ requires the user to pick five of the 12 personality traits they hope their baby will grow into

In China they name their child based on the elements and Beau wanted a similarity between how they pick their Chinese name and how they pick their English name.

And she does this by assigning personality traits to each English name.

They also select the gender of the baby and pay the equivalent of 60p.

The three chosen names are then shared with family and friends on We-Chat, China’s WhatsApp equivalent, to help make the final decision.

Each suggestion is printed on a certificate with its meaning and an example of a famous person with that name.

Interesting points from the story:

• The headline says that Beau has made 48,000 GBP
• Beau said she has named over 200,000 babies
• The website is on a .cn
• The website uses a stock photo of an older woman for Beau

The website is not resolving currently, the traffic from a website like BBC.co.uk may have overwhelmed a pedestrian type hosting plan. *Update* After refreshing for 15 minutes the site is now resolving.

SpecialName.com and .co.uk are parked pages.

Read the whole story on BBC.co.uk