Alexandra Watkins is a leading and outspoken authority on brand names. Her breakthrough book, Hello, My Name is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick, has been endorsed by the likes of Tony Hsieh from Zappos and Nir Eyal. She has been Author in Residence at the NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center and recently launched the first professional online naming course, How To Create Super Sticky Brand Names.

Since 2005, Alexandra and her firm, Eat My Words, have created love-at-first sight brand names for clients including from Amazon to Xerox. Her personal name hall of fame includes The Baconator, vertical farming company Plenty, the Neato robotic vacuum, Smitten Ice Cream, Spanish language school Gringo Lingo, frozen yogurt franchise Spoon Me, and the Church of Cupcakes.

Alexandra first got hooked on naming when Gap hired her to create names for their first line of body care products. Soon after, she broke into the business by talking her way into Landor via a Match.com date. With her fresh, unconventional naming style, Alexandra soon became a go-to resource for leading 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, sportswear, shoes, sugar scrubs, serums, and seafood. (And that’s just the S’s!)

Alexandra is not afraid to name names, especially in her entertaining presentation “How Not to Nayme Your Startup.” She is a popular speaker and has delighted audiences at conferences including Startup Grind, Endeavor, Collision, and LA Tech Week. She especially enjoys speaking to MBA students and has been invited to lecture multiple times at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, the University of Southern California, the University of San Francisco, the University of San Diego, and other fine academic institutions.

Prior to Eat My Words, Alexandra was an advertising copywriter, working at leading West Coast ad agencies, including Ogilvy and Mather, where she worked for five years, helped launch Microsoft Windows and learned the language of Geek Speak. In the mid-nineties she jumped on the dot com gravy train and rode it until it crashed in her San Francisco backyard. Alexandra took the money and ran, spending an entire year in Australia, New Zealand, Bali and Fiji disguised as a 21-year old backpacker. Upon her return, she followed her passion for creating names and soon after started Eat My Words.

Alexandra gets her passport stamped as often as possible. She has eaten her way through 50 countries where she’s sunk her teeth into delicacies including barbecued squirrel in Tanzania, ostrich carpaccio in South Africa, stewed camel meat in Libya, and lobster marinara in Cuba. Her favorite food is JIF peanut butter (crunchy), which she once survived on for two days on the remote island of Amantani in Lake Titicaca, Peru.