Our Mission
Aesop was founded to democratize the commercial power of great names and the stories they tell.
At scale. Cost-effectively. With confidence.
And in a way that helps businesses sharpen how they express their vision.
What We Do
We democratize access to powerful names by removing the barriers to professionally-led naming engagements – meaning no one needs to miss out on the opportunity to maximize the productivity of their messaging with a really great name.
We know naming isn’t something everyone loves to do. It can feel subjective, even scary, with no way to know what’s good or how to get there.
That’s why we created Aesop. To open the door to how industry experts generate great names. Our platform carefully extracts and captures the nuanced knowledge from you: a creator, a leader within an SMB, or perhaps an in-house marketer, and uses it to unleash the effectiveness of commercially-proven naming methodologies. The same methodologies are used by the most seasoned naming specialists. Methodologies that rely on the best strategic processes, construction principles, and disciplined creative practices. Methodologies that have been honed over years and years of experience.
This means our names and supporting stories are made in accordance with the branding industry’s highest standards of quality. Giving people an easy way to move beyond top-of-mind words, the name of the street they grew up on, and randomly available URLs, to find purposeful, first-rate language solutions.
Leadership
Tanya Gustafson
Founder, CEO
Tanya is the founder of Aesop and is responsible for encoding her decades of experience as a naming and verbal identity specialist into Aesop’s proprietary technology. After spending 15+ years working in the world’s biggest global brand agencies and in-house corporate design studios, Tanya founded Story Style Sound – a boutique verbal identity and storytelling agency that promises to find and construct the language clients need “to stir up all the right stuff in the people they want to reach”.
While she maintained a client list that included multi-billion – even multi–trillion–dollar enterprises, her increased workload with small-to-medium-sized businesses and start-ups made her realize the depth of the need for better access to thoughtful, high-quality naming work. So many businesses were foregoing the chance to find a relevant, high-impact name because they didn’t have the budget or appetite for a months-long, multi-round professional engagement.
This inspired the creation of Aesop – a tool designed to make sure no one needs to struggle on their own to find and feel good about the kinds of names and language designed to help change the trajectory of their business.
Our Brand Identity
We believe in the irreplaceable power of the human experience. Which is why human proficiency – and not artificial intelligence – is the cornerstone of how our platform was built and the driving force behind the names and stories it creates. And why our brand identity is a celebration of human prowess.
The name Aesop is a testament to the longevity of purposeful stories born from the human mind and human heart. The messages of Aesop’s Fables have remained part of our collective conversation for over two thousand years because they reflect the knowledge, perspective and intuition that can only arise from the human experience.
The Aesop logo is inspired by the movement of Double Dutch ropes and the astounding feats accomplished by the jumper within them. The idea of Double Dutch captivated us because it represents how an environment defined by combined, interactive forces can give rise to memorable and amazing moments. When it comes to Aesop, the two ropes are human expertise and technology. When overlapped, they create the circumstances required to produce something more exciting, more powerful, and more impressive than what either could have brought forth on its own. And what they produce are names with all the energy, agility and excellence of a Double Dutch champion.
Finally, our A icon is a visual symbol of fusing the abilities of artificial intelligence with an insightful and discerning human perspective. In short, an A-Eye.
