Familiar with femtech? It’s exactly what it sounds like: an army of robots being programmed to take over the world for womankind. Oh wait, that’s something else. Forget you read that. Femtech is actually a category of tech-enabled products and services focused on providing solutions for women’s health.
It’s a wide-ranging field, covering everything from tracking apps and wearables to care delivery and diagnostics. And within this field, there’s a wide range of names, too.
What We See
Unsurprisingly, names skew toward a softer, traditionally-feminine tone: Tia, Grace Health, Allara Health, Bloomlife, Ava, Caria, Womaness. Others suggest femininity, yet have a bolder tone: PROJKT RUBY, Maven, Elektra Health.
While other tech-related categories are often heavy on short names, we see a wide range here: everything from ultra-short (Ava, Stix, Hers) to quite long (Twentyeight, PROJKT RUBY, State of Menopause). Companies often shy away from choosing phrasal names, but they are welcome in femtech. Human names are quite popular in this space, too: Ruth, Evvy, Grace, Flo, Ava, Elektra, Stella.
Also interesting is the range from discreet to overt messaging in names. Early femtech names include Clue and Kindara — both have an air of mystery, and could just as easily be names of board games or perfumes. In more recent years, it has become more acceptable to be crystal clear about women’s health with names like Modern Fertility and State of Menopause. It’s not the only way to go — we still see plenty of suggestive and abstract names in femtech. Most recently, the company formerly known as The Pill Club rebranded as Favor to encompass their expansion of offerings beyond birth control pills.
Takeaways
Along with the new breadth of offerings available to improve women’s health and lives, we see a world of opportunity for names. As a society, we’ve broken free from the unspoken requirement to keep names for women’s products delicate and demure. It’s not all Summer’s Eve and Always anymore. Now, we can be demure if we want (Grace, Bloomlife), or we can wink at each other with a reference to the female body (Twentyeight, Oova, Woom), or we can come right out and say exactly what we’re doing (State of Menopause, Modern Fertility.) When it comes to women’s health and names, it sure is good to have options.
Jill Stanewick is a director of naming & strategy at Tanj.