A winner of the Make Mine a Million $ Business program sponsored by American Express, Alexandra has turned her passion for naming things into a thriving company.

Alexandra first got hooked on naming when Gap hired her to create cheeky names for their first line of body care products. Soon after, she broke into the business by weaseling her way into Landor via a Match.com date. With her fresh, unconventional naming style, Alexandra soon became a go-to resource for countless branding and naming firms around the country. And Landor sent her enough business to open her own firm. Since then, she’s generated thousands of names for snacks, software, sunscreen, social networking sites, sportswear, shoes, sugar scrubs, serums, and seafood. (And that’s just the S’s!) She’s also named lots of things that make you fat and drunk including a nationally recognized bacon cheeseburger (which ironically, must remain nameless).

Prior to Eat My Words, Alexandra was an advertising copywriter, working at leading ad agencies up and down the West Coast, including five years at Ogilvy and Mather, where she helped pimp everything from Microsoft to Mighty Dog. In the mid-nineties she jumped on the dot com gravy train, and rode it until it crashed in her SOMA backyard. Alexandra took the money and ran, spending a year in Australia, New Zealand, Bali and Fiji disguised as a 21-year old backpacker. Upon her return, she followed her true passion and became a namer and soon after started Eat My Words. Alexandra gets her passport stamped as often as possible. She has eaten her way through 40+ countries where she’s sunk her teeth into local delicacies including barbequed squirrel in Tanzania, ostrich carpaccio in South Africa and stewed camel meat in Libya. Her favorite food is JIF peanut butter, which she once survived on for two days on the remote island of Amantani in Lake Titicaca, Peru. She is an excellent photographer as documented in albums from two recent adventures, My Summer Vacation in Cuba and My Christmas Vacation in Cuba.

Known as the “left brain” of Eat My Words, Mik Seipier may be the only naming professional in the world whose personal hero is Luca Pacioli, the 14th century friar who codified double-entry bookkeeping. Blessed with a world-class case of ADD (before it was hip), Mik has discovered that creative naming works well with his pinball mind, finding associations and naming avenues that mesh well with Eat My Words’ evocative naming style. With a MBA and a background in finance, Mik looks beyond the name itself to see the potential to enhance the overall profitability of the company, with the name becoming one of its most valuable assets. Return On Investment for brand names is a major interest of Mik’s and he is working on algorithms to quantify it. In fact it was Mik who came up with the now famous equation, “EMW = ROI.”

On any given day, Mik may wake up his brain by ideating creative names or taglines for a new consumer product, an hour later be teaching a finance class on the wonders of the effects of variable costs on breakeven analysis, and finish up the day throwing down Boolean searches at the USPTO’s trademark database or writing a biting blog entry for The Kitchen Sink.

Working on hundreds of naming/tagline projects for many leading naming/branding agencies over the last several years has allowed Mik to not only be aware of naming trends and processes (and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors), but also what name types and processes stand the test of time. Due to stringent NDA’s and his inherent fear of certified letters and a guy named Vito, the companies he has worked for and names he developed that others took credit for, shall ironically remain nameless. We believe Mik may in fact be in the Witness Protection Program, hiding out in Oregon, disguised as a lumberjack.

Mik remains most proud of his first naming assignment at age six, coming up with the name for his dog, “Steve Johnson.”

Through a mixture of natural business smarts, osmosis and bionic hearing, over the past three years, Rena has become an expert in all things Eat My Words. Her ability to bring home the bacon is the result of her fearless appetite for new challenges, new business, and new shoes.

A born multi-tasker and task master, Rena skillfully manages all of our projects and creative talent, which she dutifully tracks on her white board with a complex color coded system only she and members of Mensa can decipher. A typical day for Rena includes briefing a team on a naming project, writing up an agreement for a new client, and reeling in a few new ones.

In addition to all of her account management work, Rena’s right brain is often engaged coming up with names, taglines and promotional ideas for our clients. Her latest achievement is naming is a social media app for dogs: the Fire Hydrant.

When she’s not running down checks or deadlines, Rena is running with the SF Road Runner’s club training for her second marathon. Rena loves adventure (skydiving, bungee jumping, sailing the Nile in a small motor-less felucca), road trips, playing with her food, night hikes, bonfires, cooking over an open flame, vintage bowling ball bags, and she thinks composting is sexy. Her secret wish when she grows up is to race a 1966 Volvo “Amazon,” white with red interior, in a rally car race.

Affectionately referred to as “Hollywood” by the EMW team, actress/writer/namer Gina Sorell (who at one time was known simply as “Jinxy”), is an urban hipster who has her finger on the pulse of what’s hot and hip in Los Angeles, Manhattan, Toronto and beyond. A Second City alumna, Gina is fast on her feet, and swears that improvising and inventing new names is really the same thing (although the latter can be done without the presence of drunken crowds and the smell of chicken wings). Since joining the EMW team nearly five years ago, Gina has contributed her creativity to countless projects, naming everything from vodka to snack foods to technology, which is rather appropriate considering that “simultaneously drinking, eating and writing on my laptop,” are listed under the “Special Skills” section of her resume. Gina’s cheeky name for an acne medication, “Later, Crater,” led to our first annual April Fools Day presentation, resulting in a big laugh from favorite client, Guthy-Renker.

Gina’s acting has taken her all over the world and has given her a broad perspective and knowledge of people, places and things that many other namers can only dream about. And being on the other side of the camera, has given Gina a unique insight into pitching and naming as she has been the face of over 30 national commercial and voiceover campaigns.

At first glance, she may appear “vanilla,” but don’t be fooled by Monica Scalf’s suburban Midwestern life. Born and raised in the heartland, she’s married to her high school sweetheart, runs a mean carpool, and can fold laundry one handed while watching Oprah and quizzing either one of her two all American kids.

Ordinary, maybe, but she’s an expert at finding the extraordinary whether generating names for CPG brands, fueling her wildly popular blog The Ordinary Matters, booking events for her creative learning company The Playground Group, or writing her humor column for The Cincinnati Enquirer. As a former English Professor and constant lover of words, her favorite job is naming all things kids, family, and fun for Eat My Words.

Logging hundreds of hours in the aisles of neighborhood grocery stores and wandering around mega malls, Monica is in touch with the modern mom and the names that call out from the endless shelves of possibilities. Among her recent naming feats is titling her first book, Live in the Little: 52 Ways to Find the Extra in the Ordinary.

Rena’s Great Dane, Sofie, is a precocious two-year old who has been with Eat My Words since she was a puppy. She now weighs more than Alexandra. A striking figure in her Russian Hill neighborhood, Sofie has been known to stop a cable car in its tracks so tourists can take her picture.