I co-own the brand chilledheat. Everything to do with the name has been bought and registered globally for the last 10 years. Nothing has been done with the name, but that’s beside the point.

Someone else liked the name and wanted it for their business, but sadly they couldn’t get the name they wanted, so they got chilled-heat instead. You can sometimes see their vans flying around the Southwest – installing central heating systems and air conditioning. The business appears to be doing well.

Not long after they got themselves on-line, at chilled-heat.co.uk, I started getting their emails, intended for richard@chilled-heat.co.uk, but actually being sent by mistake (from their customers) to richard@chilledheat.co.uk. I receive everything @chilledheat.co.uk, and as soon as I starting getting these emails I pinged a message to the company and said their customers are emailing me by mistake, please could they make amends or it will damage their business.

The response was less than favourable, they claimed there wasn’t a problem and they would look into it. Months passed and I still received their emails, I stopped forwarding them on and started deleting them. Eventually I got fed up with them and called the company, and spoke to the boss, Richard. I explained the situation, he said he never received any email from me and didn’t know there was a problem, and said he’d sort everything out. Nothing happened (as far as I’m concerned) and now, 5 or 6 years later, I’m still receiving emails for his company: financial info, business quotes, work applications, new business inquiries and spam.

This is the problem with having hyphenated company name.

You think you’re called, e-z-chairs-uk.com, because when you see it and say it you do not speak the hyphens. But when someone is listening to you say it, you have to stress all the hyphens. So actually you have to say,

‘eee hyphen zee hyphen chairs hyphen uk dot com’

Here’s another example:  biz-help-4-u.com

Which equates to:

biz (with a zed) hyphen help hyphen number 4 hyphen the letter ‘u’ dot com

A big fat ugly mouthful of a domain name! You could argue that it doesn’t matter, because in email and web pages people will just see the link and click it, and in person you can give them a business card and they will see what to type. I agree. However, people talk, people listen, and people try to follow up on what they have heard. A hyphenated business makes listening and acting much, much harder for the consumer and you probably won’t know the difficulty you’re causing people. Lots of businesses struggle/fail for all sorts of reasons. One of those many reasons may be customers remember the name, but try as they might, can’t find it because or hyphens, weird naming conventions or using numbers instead.

If you’re searching for a great business/product/service name: stay away from hyphens. Period.