Taylor A. Humphrey, with her blond highlights, camera-ready smile, well-lit videos and knack for going viral, is the model
TikTok-era entrepreneur. But to some of her critics, she’s also the living embodiment of the Bay Area’s tech-fueled excess: an influencer catering to the uber-wealthy with a boutique business that sounds like satire.
“It’s a little embarrassing when you get made fun of on the internet,” said Humphrey, who’s based in San Francisco. “But at the same time, I’m like, ‘Well, it
is silly.’ I come up with baby names for a living.”
Humphrey didn’t set out to build a luxury baby-naming enterprise. When she started posting online a decade ago about her baby-name obsession, she was just hoping for a distraction from one of her life’s bleakest periods. The 37-year-old Humphrey now has 100,000 combined followers on TikTok and Instagram, and an ever-expanding portfolio of more than 500 children’s names she helped select. Her “bespoke” naming services cost up to $30,000.
At a time when finding the perfect name can often feel like a high-stakes exercise in “baby branding,” Humphrey is one of a dozen or so professional baby-name consultants nationwide whose full-time job is to guide expectant parents along their naming journey. She’s also believed to be the only one in the Bay Area, where affluence and an innovative ethos make it one of this niche industry’s top markets.
For some moneyed parents, choosing a name is no different than selecting a kitchen backsplash: personal, yes, but best outsourced to a pro. Humphrey’s clientele tends to span everyone from high-profile celebrities to the anonymously rich. Regardless of the intricacies of their naming needs, she promises to have the ideal package.
Taylor Humphrey, baby name consultant, was named after a soap opera actress.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
Just want an email with some personalized baby-name recommendations? That’ll be $200. Need something far more in-depth? Any of her higher-end services, which start at $10,000, amount to the “VIP treatment.”
Add-on features include a “baby name branding” campaign, a genealogical investigation designed to ferret out old family names, even a think tank to discuss the top naming options. As Humphrey notes on her
official website, the only limits are “your own imagination.”
“It’s kind of like how everyone wants their house to look like HGTV,” said Pamela Redmond, chief executive of the baby-naming website
Nameberry. “A lot of people say they want a name that’s unique or individual. But, when it comes right down to it, they really don’t. Most baby-name consultants are selling a vast idea of what constitutes good taste.”
Thirty years ago, baby naming seemed relatively straightforward: Pick what feels right and hope — maybe, pray — that your child isn’t one of eight
Jessicas in her kindergarten class. The rise of the internet changed things. Copious amounts of data — from websites charting popularity trends to
academic studies exploring correlations between children’s names and their future success — now heighten the pressure parents feel to pick just the right moniker.
Two decades after Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin surprised the world by naming their daughter Apple, celebrity influencers have made the fruit-inspired choice look tame. Among their recently viral branding efforts: Poetry Lucia. Locket Romance. Slim Easy. Rumble Honey. And, oh yeah,
Malibu Barbie and Aquaman.
With nearly nothing off-limits, parents often have a harder time finding a name they love. Experts also believe that a never-ending list of options has contributed to a surge in what they call “name regret.” Last year, a
BabyCenter.com survey found that nearly 10% of mothers wish they had named their child something else.
This is just one reason Humphrey often has a backlog of clients. Though she declined to divulge her estimated income, her reach has swelled since
the New Yorker credited her with helping more than 100 families in 2021.
Along the way, her clients’ requests have become more exacting. The “perfect” name must almost always be uncommon, yet not weird; simple, yet not basic; on trend, yet not trendy.
“Everyone has so many opinions about what makes a ‘good’ name,” said Leda Bashi, a San Francisco resident who hired Humphrey to help name her youngest son. “It can be tough sometimes to sift through all the noise.”
Reading aloud from a bright pink notebook bedazzled in glitter and beads, Humphrey detailed some of her former clients’ needs. There was a single, gay man expecting a baby through surrogacy who just wanted help brainstorming names. An older couple who couldn’t find a name they liked for baby boy No. 4. A multicultural family seeking a name that bridged their different ethnic backgrounds.
Often, while brokering deep-rooted disagreements between spouses on Zoom, she feels more like a mediator or therapist than a baby namer.
Humphrey’s qualifications? On top of being a trained doula with a background in branding and marketing, she’s a self-described “name nerd” with thousands of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets loaded with baby names.
“There’s a lot more to this job than people realize,” said Humphrey, who was named after 1980s soap opera actress Taylor Miller. “Sometimes, I get calls from clients that are so urgent that I need to drop everything and help them right away.”
Adrianne Holland, a luxury real estate agent from Fort Worth, Texas, had just given birth to her daughter, Mara, when she FaceTimed Humphrey last year in a panic. Though Mara was happy and healthy despite arriving three weeks early, Holland couldn’t get released from the hospital until she filled out the birth certificate.
Adrianne Holland poses with her husband, Bowie, and their newborn daughter, Mara. Taylor Humphrey helped the couple choose Mara’s middle name.
Canon Sawyer/Canon Elizabeth Photography
The problem: She and her husband, Bowie, couldn’t decide on Mara’s middle name. Bowie insisted on his grandmother’s name, Priscilla, which Holland abhorred. The more time passed without a solution, the more Holland feared becoming another baby-naming horror story.
Holland said that years earlier, after two of her close friends had their first child together, they became so deadlocked on the name issue that they refused to complete the birth certificate. More than a week passed without them being allowed to leave the hospital. With insurance refusing to cover the extended stay, Holland said, the couple’s medical bill totaled more than $300,000.
Fortunately, Holland had Humphrey, who tinkered with variants of Priscilla until she uncovered a middle name the couple could agree upon: Lily. The impasse ended minutes before Holland’s mandated discharge time.
“We were getting pretty desperate,” Holland said. “But now, it feels like that was always meant to be Mara’s middle name.”
Holland’s situation wasn’t as rare as some people might assume. With Americans now
spending more than two hours per day on social media, many expecting couples have come to dread the distinctly modern initiation into parenthood: “New Arrival” posts.
Those photos featuring monogrammed baby blankets or signs are ripe for unsolicited feedback. And, as corporate-naming guru Steve Manning put it, “Naming critiques from friends and family are a recipe for disaster.”
He should know.
As the founder and CEO of the Sausalito-based Igor Naming Agency, Manning has masterminded such recognizable names as Gogo Inflight Internet, Aria Resort and Casino, and TruTV. Yet, when it came time for his life’s biggest naming assignment, he couldn’t get the necessary approval.
“I wanted to name my daughter ‘July,’ which I thought was so unique and pretty,” Manning said. “But my then-wife, who’s now my ex-wife, wouldn’t do it just because her dad didn’t like it. My daughter (Grace) is 22 now, and I’m still not totally over it.”
Humphrey estimated that about half of her clients are struggling with some form of name regret.
Baby name consultant Taylor Humphrey, left, hugs boyfriend Jeffrey Juelsgaard. Humphrey calls herself a “name nerd.”
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
To help even more parents grieve the name they wish they’d chosen, she published a 15-page e-book in fall 2023 titled “Baby Name Mourning.” Though she has no children of her own, she has some sense of what those remorseful clients are feeling.
In 2019, after a couple told her they wanted to name their daughter Ayla, Humphrey persuaded them to use the more common spelling of Isla. A year later, while watching an Instagram video from the baby girl’s first birthday party, Humphrey saw another name spelled out on a letter board: A-Y-L-A.
“My heart sank in that moment,” Humphrey said. “I was just like, ‘Dang, I missed the mark on this one.’ I didn’t actually listen to them.”
Since then, she has vowed to prioritize her clients’ preferences.
Her exhaustive naming questionnaires reveal a deep understanding of parents’ personalities, interests, and naming likes and dislikes. For a couple hundred dollars, she’ll email them a lengthy list of curated name recommendations, complete with each name’s meanings, origins, variant spellings, popularity history, even “vibes.”
The more involved her guidance becomes, the higher her pricing soars. That infamous $30,000 package can last several months, include support from professional genealogists and brand managers, and require frequent video consultations with Humphrey.
“If your services cost a lot,” Manning said, “people often assume you must be worth it.”
But when Humphrey first waded into this hyper-specific industry in 2018, she had one set rate of $100. Three years earlier, she started her
@Whatsinababyname Instagram account, just to share her passion with others and help herself through a difficult time.
For about half a decade, Humphrey had ping-ponged among a slew of short-lived jobs in New York City, only to stop working altogether to deal with a mysterious autoimmune disorder. While back home in the Redwood City area to recover and meet with different doctors, her social media presence ballooned. Followers began messaging her for help naming their babies.
“I had no idea what to charge for something like that,” Humphrey said. “I didn’t even know where to start.”
That changed in February 2022. While at an exclusive dinner filled with venture capitalists, a friend encouraged Humphrey to tell those investors that her starting baby-name package cost $1,500. They didn’t blink.
Two months later, the New Yorker published its profile on her, with her prices. It quickly went viral.
“I had to come to terms with the fact that people often find me through content that pokes fun at me,” said Humphrey, who has since introduced cheaper naming packages in hopes of expanding her client base past the super-wealthy. “I accept it because I believe the work I’m doing is really important.”
It doesn’t hurt that Humphrey’s home market has emerged as one of the country’s bigger baby-naming hubs. In 2010, after opening up her business to remote work, New York-based baby name consultant Sherri Suzanne noticed that about a fifth of her expecting parents lived in and around San Francisco — far more than any other major metro area.
To this day, she often jokes with friends that she could make more money if she started working on West Coast time. Some of her Bay Area clients are tech workers accustomed to seeking out experts and identifying creative solutions. Others are merely independent thinkers.
“The Bay is just that perfect melting pot,” Suzanne said. “People there tend to be open and willing to get some outside feedback.”
For more than two hours on a sunny recent Tuesday, Humphrey discussed her rise in baby naming outside a Noe Valley cafe. A young woman at a nearby table kept glancing up from her laptop. When Humphrey grabbed her hot-pink notebook and turned to leave, the woman stopped her.
“Excuse me,” the woman said. “My best friend is pregnant, and I think she could really use your help.”
Humphrey smiled. “If business keeps up like this,” she later said, “I’m going to need an assistant.”