The name yellowell started off as do re mi.
That’s a huge clue.
Naming is my least enjoyable creative endeavor, albeit at times, also the most satisfying. It’s creatively challenging because there are so few names left, thanks to podcasts, social handles, blogs, personal sites, Amazon, etc. The New York Times wrote about this a while back with “All Your Favorite Brands, From BSTOEM to ZGGCD: How Amazon is causing us to drown in trademarks.” But it’s also a challenge because naming is personal, causing people to lose objectivity. It’s why branding agencies often struggle with branding themselves. “I’ll know the name,” the client says, “when I see it.” And that’s when your heartaches begin. I didn’t immediately see the name yellowell, but I also didn’t have to do much concepting to find it. I just had to write down “do re mi.”
In my original copy exploration for the Joe Dirt movie poster tagline, you’ll notice that my business back then was called Wordplayground. Prior to that, it was Michael and His Incredible Idea Machine, I think. Hollywood Copy lasted by far the longest. None worked now, as I’ve contributed as much creative concepting and copywriting to higher ed as to Hollywood. So my primary goal was a business name that wouldn’t imply any specific industry and wouldn’t mean anything to anyone, except to me. And that it does.
The very first thing I jotted down in what I thought would be a frustrating naming process was do re mi. It possesses three syllables, which I love. It’s also close to being an anagram for Mike Roe. Do re mi, of course, is from The Sound of Music. We sang Do Re Mi in a grade school music class. A former girlfriend and I also had a pug we’d named Edelweiss, because she looked happy to meet us. I also love Nirvana, and one of Kurt Cobain’s final compositions was a song then titled Do Re Mi.
As was often the case with Kurt, song titles evolved as he wrote and recorded. Do re mi was no different, as he’d referred to the song throughout its writing as “Dough, Ray and Me” and “Me and My I.V.” There’s no telling what name he might have landed on — naming’s difficult, as I said — as the song remained unfinished and unreleased at his death.
Kurt treated lyrics like he did titles, so it’s not surprising that multiple versions of lyrics appear online.
I wasn’t fond of “yellow whale,” but I loved “yell, ‘oh well.’” So much so, in fact, that after confirming the URL was available, I called it done. And that’s where the name yellowell came from. I’m both a happy copywriter and a satisfied client.