Amazon , the e-commerce giant, is a company that has a history of great success, a brand that now everyone knows. However, few know that Jeff Bezos’ company was not initially called that and that in fact it was born under another name and also had other quite interesting options on the table that are also “active”. Let us now know the story of why Amazon is called Amazon and what led to choosing that name.
Why is Amazon so called?
It was at the beginning of 1994 when Amazon was born as an electronic book sales business, although under the first name of Cadabra, Inc. This was a name that wanted to underline the “magic” of the company, but in reality Bezos and associates soon realized that it was not very suitable for their purpose.
In fact, after the trademark was registered in Washington State in July 1994 , Todd Tarbert, Jeff Bezos’ first attorney, pointed out that the name “Cadabra” could not give that “magical” impact that the company wanted. Also, on the phone the pronunciation was too similar to the word ‘corpse’, so it didn’t seem like a good way to introduce themselves to their future clientele.
At that point, Bezos and his now ex-wife MacKenzie began searching for the ideal name for the company. Several options were examined: such as Browse, Bookmall, Relentless and Awake and all of them were discarded although there is a curious fact about them. If you try to connect to browse.com, relentless.com, and awake.com, you will see that these domains link to the Amazon site today. According to various reports, it seems that Bezos especially liked the name “relentless” (which means “relentless”) although he was not chosen either.
The idea of choosing the Amazon name came up at the end of October 1994 . There are several theories as to how Bezos came to this name. One of the most often commented on is that Bezos was flipping through the dictionary, starting with all the words with the letter A. Upon seeing the word Amazonas, he began to think that it was a perfect name for the company, since the Amazon is the longest river on Earth. He wanted to build the largest bookstore in the world (the company started with the book business and then expanded into full e-commerce).
According to theories, Bezos announced to his colleagues the new name of the company stating : » The Amazon River is not only the longest river in the world, but the second in the ranking is far behind. The Amazon River destroys all competitors «. In short, it seems that Bezos already had his ideas clear at that time. Amazon’s domain was registered on November 1, 1994, giving rise to the fact that the company could finally be born as such and eventually end up becoming one of the largest online stores in the world.
