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Who We Are, Where We Came From, What We Do
Name One! is a national name generation and brand identity firm with offices in New York, Asheville NC, and Dallas. Our group began in 1983 as the naming center of The Richards Group advertising agency in Dallas, becoming Name One! in the summer of 1996. The present team has been together for more than 12 years.
Our service includes consulting, name generation, screening, trademark availability, evaluating names and facilitation of the name decision. When we work with clients, we are "part of the team", lending our expertise and strategizing with our clients' advertising agencies, design firms, legal department and research efforts.
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Lee Ballard, Founder & Principal
Lee Ballard's professional career began as a linguist studying the Ibaloi language in the mountains of Luzon Island, Philippines. He learned to speak the language, described the sound system which was converted into a modern alphabet, gathered text material, described the morphology and grammar, produced literacy materials, published many articles and monographs, compiled an 8,000-root Ibaloi-English dictionary and translated much of the Bible into Ibaloi.
This work naturally led into a second career as a consultant in linguistic programs in all parts of the Philippines, in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nepal, Vietnam, Panama and finally with language programs in 30 Native American languages.
In the late 1970s, Ballard started a freelance writing business, Lee Ballard & Associates: writing magazine articles, movie treatments and ghosting books.
While researching one magazine article in 1983, Ballard met Stan Richards, president of a Dallas advertising agency. Richards asked Ballard to establish a naming center at The Richards Group. Ballard worked with Richards for 13 years.
The naming center team left The Richards Group and founded Name One! in the summer of 1996. Today the group has offices in Mars Hill, NC, New York and Dallas, serving accounts as diverse as The Home Depot, Marriott, Charles Schwab, Wyndham Hotels, Freddie Mac and Brinker International. They also serve as subcontractors to advertising, marketing and public relations firms.
Terri Boese, Principal
Terri Boese joined the Name One! team in 1987, as a name generation specialist and trademark checker. A natural wordsmith proficient in several languages, Ms. Boese has the rare gift for seeing name potential in unlikely places and a poet's instinct for blending sounds and syllables. Her extensive sales background allowed her to see things from the client's - and their client's - point of view, a huge advantage in creating names and making recommendations. She began her own naming practice under the Name One! umbrella in 1996.
Ms. Boese has participated in more than 400 projects, acting as team leader on many of them. She counts among her successes: MainStay Suites for Choice Hotels, PowerPath and Excelerate for Texas Instruments, CompleteHeat for Lennox Industries, Right At Home for The Home Depot, Acuitus for Humphrey Instruments, Permion for Bruce Floors and Learning Loan for Guaranty Federal. Ms. Boese has also done pro bono work for churches, women's shelters, and public television, among others. She coined the name for an incentive program for the Dallas Youth Orchestra: Practissimo!
Ms. Boese's practice today includes clients in home products, telecommunications and other technologies. She works well with advertising and public relations agencies.
Lauren Teton, Principal
Lauren Teton began her career in naming early in 1992 after reading an article in an airline magazine about companies that name new products. She was intrigued to learn of the existence of such a specialty and contacted one of the subjects of the article, Lee Ballard. He was quoted as having a "brain trust of name generation specialists across the country, people who love words and the challenges of molding words into trademarks." She "auditioned" on a naming project and several names she suggested showed a remarkable sense of the appropriate. One became a finalist. From 1992 to 1996 she successfully worked on hundreds of naming projects with Ballard.
In 1996 Ms. Teton started the New York office of Name One! and now counts among her clients: Siemens Medical Systems, Marriott, Towers Perrin, Fallon New York, Long John Silver's, Zeiss Humphrey Systems, Welch-Allyn, LaserSight, Greenfield Online, Snowball.com and Imperium Solutions. Some of the names created for these clients are:
PeoplePulse and SuccessScreen for Greenfield Online, Siemen's Infinity Chart Assist, Humphrey's Atlas, Acuitus, and Ensemble, Welch Allyn's Viewfinder, LaserSight's MicroShape, UltraEdge, Unishaper, and Ultrashaper, and Iquestics for Snowball.com. She has created a proprietary name ranking system called The Teton NameScale which quantifies the answer to the question, "What makes a good name?" Ms. Teton combines her language, managemement and public speaking skills to show clients the right names, and just as important, help them come to a decision. Her participation in over 300 naming projects, market studies on name preferences, and creation of The Teton NameScale have given her insight into the psychology of name selection and a professional's intuition as to what names will work for her clients.
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