Every town has one. The fish and chip shop with a pun on the sign, the hairdresser who couldn’t resist, the tradie whose van makes you look twice.
Some are happy accidents. Blenheim’s Butt Drilling is a family-run firm whose directors include Jonathan Butt, and it says it has put in more than 1,500 water wells across Marlborough, Nelson and North Canterbury since 1990.
Others are built for the laugh. Melbourne’s Lord of the Fries started as a vegetarian chip van in 2004, and a co-founder’s brother, Sam, came up with the name. So, is a pun worth it?
Massey University marketing professor Bodo Lang thinks the bigger risk is the opposite. He told Newsroom the most common naming mistake he saw in New Zealand was a boring name.
Many small business owners are good at their trade but aren’t marketers, Lang said, and they name the business after themselves when they should be thinking about what customers will remember. A brand name should be a little bit clever, memorable and positive, he said, and he pointed to arborists Tree Fellas as one that gets it right.
The Companies Office won’t register a company name that’s offensive, obscene or likely to offend a religious group or section of the community. It rejected 4,474 company name applications in 2025, according to figures Newsroom reported, but only six were for offence. Most were too close to a name already on the register.
A pun can also borrow from someone else’s brand. Middle-earth Enterprises, which holds Lord of the Rings rights, opposed Lord of the Fries’ bid to trade mark “Lord of the” in Australia. IP Australia dismissed the opposition in 2025, the ABC reported, and Middle-earth took it to the Federal Court.
Hamilton brewery Brewaucracy has seen both sides. Co-founder Greig McGill says the good has far outweighed the bad, and he blames the bad on “the poor quality of our education system”.
“People can’t spell the base word, bureaucracy,” he said. “As a result, they can’t substitute out the first syllable with the obvious beer-related pun.”
“As a result, nobody can spell the bloody name! It gets very tedious having to spell it out to everyone I interact with when they ask for my email, especially when combined with a first name that already has an unexpected and silent vowel.”
The upside is bigger. “Almost everyone tells us they love our name, and that it’s memorable. Given that we’re driven by people remembering us and coming into our taproom, that’s been gold.”
McGill admits they kind of stole it. Hamilton once had a bar called Bar-ocracy that sometimes had more interesting beer on, well before craft beer was a thing. He and business partner Phil Murray are classical liberals who eye bureaucrats and big government with some suspicion, so they took the name, swapped the bar for a brew and ran with it “in the spirit of irony”.
When I asked Auckland hairdresser Ella Zailan about her salon, Curl Up N’ Dye, she said the name was the first thing new clients talked about.
“Every new client will usually ask me where I got the name from because they love the pun, and quite often they’ll go away and tell their friends and family about it,” she said. “People remember the name!”
She found it at 17, watching Runaway Bride, which features a salon called Curl Up and Dye. About 20 years later, when she opened her own salon, it was still the name she kept coming back to, and no one in Auckland seemed to be using it.
“What do you normally do when you’re sitting in a salon? You relax, you curl up… and then I dye your hair.”
The name also did something she didn’t plan. Zailan has never advertised as a curly hair specialist, but curly-haired clients assumed she was one, left lovely reviews, and it snowballed from there.
She’s now the go-to hairdresser for quite a few of them, and her Instagram posts and emails open with “Hey Curlies”.
“I honestly never expected a name I chose because I thought it was cool and funny to end up actually influencing the type of clients I attract.”
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