Cafe Name Generator

Step 5: Shortlisting your name ideas

It’s weeding time! This is where you prune and pick only the best names for your cafe. Your shortlist should have about 3-5 names off your initial list.

Picking your favorite cafe name ideas may be tough, especially if you used our name generator. There are a few things you need to consider when creating a shortlist.

1. Keep it simple. Good cafe names should be unique, but mostly simple. Simple names are easily remembered.
2. Check for linguistics and context. Do a quick google search of your names to find out what they mean in other languages- especially your target countries. If any of them has an offensive meaning in another language, it’s best to go with a different name.
3. Sometimes owners choose business name that later become controversial especially in overseas markets. Don’t make that mistake. Eliminate any chances of the name being misinterpreted as sexist, homophobic, racist, or offensive in any way to any community.
4. Tagline check. If you haven’t come up with a tagline at this point, take a pause and do that. It’s important that your chosen coffee shop name aligns with your tagline, which is also your slogan.

It is your prerogative to decide the elimination criteria, but this checklist should help you shorten your list:

• Is the name culturally sensitive?
• Does the name capture the values and vision of your brand?
• Does the name align with your tagline? If you don’t have a tagline ready, you need to create it at this point and align it with your preferred app name.
• How relatable is the name to the target audience?
• Of the most relatable names, which ones are the easiest to remember?
• Can your target audience pronounce the name easily and accurately?
• How original does the name sound? You don’t want clichés and plagiarized names.

Now, reduce your list from the original 20-40 names to about 3-5 names.

When you have truthfully answered these questions to yourself, you can go ahead with the shortlist. I’ve created a list of the 5 best cafe names from my perspective. For each one, there’s a reason explaining they stand out from the rest.

• Comfort Zone: although this is an abstract name for a cafe, it suggests a place where one can relax and have a cup of hot tea or two. A place amongst friends, which is what the ambience of a cafe should depict.
• Decaf Only: this name idea shows that the cafe is targeted at a specific audience. It describes the cafe as one that serves only decaffeinated drinks.
• Roast And Chill: Although self-contradictory at a first glance, this name idea suggests that you can relax at the cafe, while nursing a cup of hot roast.
• B’s Beanery: this cafe name attaches the identity of the owner to the establishment. “B’s Beanery” sets this cafe apart from every other in the vicinity because it’s a specific name.
• Cups and Scones: this name idea suggests that drinks and pastries are served in this cafe.

Step 6: Background Check

Once you have shortlisted the best creative coffee shop names, background checks are necessary. A background check might just save you from future legal battles and cases of misinterpretation. Here are a few things to do in a background check.

• Research Legality: You do not want to get in trouble with the law because you’re starting a coffee shop business. So, find out if your intended cafe names and taglines are in accordance with the law of your home country. Do this for each name on the shortlist. If any of them does not pass the test, drop that name and move on with the others.

• Trademark Check: to avoid cases of trademark infringement down the line, find out if your names for coffee shop or logo is already trademarked by another organization. If it’s not, you have the go-ahead to register it as your own trademark.

• Readability: is your names for coffee shop easy to read and understand? You can get an external opinion on the readability of your cafe name and tagline. If it’s not, you have the opportunity to fix that because you’re not creating it for yourself alone.

Step 7: Get some Feedback

You have narrowed down your 20-40 name list to 2-3 names at this point.

Simple step: It’s great to have the opinion of a third-party when you’re done with the primary checks. Their opinion may differ from yours, but it’s mostly objective criticism so that’s okay. You can show a list of your final 2 club names to;

1. People who run coffee shop.
2. Your target audience.

If you’re asking your ideal audience, ask the first thing they thought of on hearing that name. Ask a coffee bar owner how they think an audience would interpret your cafe name.

Once you get feedback, go back and figure out if their response was in favor of your cafe name or not. Ask yourself if the name evoked the thoughts, you had imagined it would.

Pro Step: If you want to go deeper with the feedback step you can reach out to opinion shapers, industry leaders, your ideal customers, linguists, and tech futurists for their opinions.

• Tech futurists will help you predict and reshape the future prospects of your new coffee bar name within the global tech space.
• Linguists will advise on the name’s readability and lingual appropriateness.
• Opinion shapers and industry leaders will help you predict the cafe’s probable reception in the real world.
• Ideal customers will tell you whether the names for coffee bar represents a need they would purchase.

Pro tip: Don’t rely too much on feedback from biased people, especially fans, friends, family members, and colleagues. Seek the opinion of brutally honest critics.

Step 8: Check if the name is available

You have come a long way in trying to name your coffee bar. Now, the final step is to check if your cafe name and extension of choice are available for domain registration. You can use our name availability checker to run a quick check after you have generated name ideas for your coffee bar business. Our free tool shows you which domain extensions are available, and will recommend logo ideas that correspond with your coffee bar name. Or you can Google the shortlisted names to ensure that they aren’t plagiarized. Looking up the names will also give you an idea of what each name might mean to different internet users.

The cafe name generator and availability checker are highly recommended, to make your coffee bar stand out from the rest.