Name hunting in 2023?

How do you choose your names?, a question that often comes up after naming over 100 characters of ours. We pretty much reason the same way as when we named our children. A beautiful name, but also a little practical (not too long, no strange nicknames, not the same as your best friend’s child), but above all a name that feels good in the stomach, a name to love.

Sometimes we have an entire collection of characters and then it’s a bit like name siblings. We want the names to join the same genre. That’s about it, how we think about name hunting.

Do we sometimes run out of ideas? Of course we do. We often say, “what was that boy name we were talking about last week?” and so we start searching. We often end up on the lists of top name, new born names and then we collected names in all imaginable notebooks.

In Sweden we find Astrid, Maja, Alma, Vera and Freja at the top. And William, Liam, Noah, Hugo and Oliver.
We realize that we are missing a few of these names on our list, but we have most of them in our assortment.

Oh lala so many beautiful names! Ivy and Isla! But how lovely are these! In our collection of friends there is both an Olivia (sold out) an Ava and a Noah.

Hello Spain! We agree, Lucia and Martin are such nice names. And these go straight up on our wish list. Maybe already in the next collection. On the other hand, we have loaned a Hugo to Desenio and we can find a Lucas among our best sellers.

We often glance at our favorite country, France, not just for the name. Did you know that the first book we did take place in ‘Les Petits’, a fantasy world with 100% inspiration from Paris. However, it never left the drawing and writing desk, but one day we have promised ourselves to give new life into it.

Alors, Que-ce-que we find the top name in France then? Emma and Alice, of course. Do you remember them? Two big sellers long gone from our poster range, maybe their names have to make a come-back. On the boy side, we have not used any of these nice names. Gabriel is a favorite, and Arthur.

Miss Alice, do you remember?

And Miss Emma, what about her?

Emma, minsann…

Again, little miss Emma..

Yes, this is how we do it. Read lists, get inspired and wants to produce lots of new characters that we can give new names of our own. Do you think we will see double names on the lists soon?

Our own name peak is a little statistically incorrect. We have more posters with Gertrud, hence our bestseller three year in a row; My Umbrella. But hey, we actually have a total of four motifs with Gertrud as the main character. And a book. And patches. And cards. So the statistics are perhaps a bit hallabaloo. Bille is on a poster together with the horse Bo, so does she really count? Elba is a strong person (found both as a child and as an young adult) who also plays the main role in our first book ‘Lonely in the Land of Letters‘. And then Penny with her magical curls, who also has her own book and Emily, lovely Emily.

A quick view to the boy names, we find many favorites. Noah, Lucas, Fred, Henry and Morris. Then we have mr Sixten, him with the book.

So, what are the names of our own four real children? Let’s see … Ester, Maria, Märta, Helga, Linnea, Harry, Erik, Valter, Olle, Anders, Martin. If you like names, you can sprinkle with them. Old rule, but still applies.