Professional baby namer paid thousands to find the perfect moniker

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For some people, coming up with a name for their baby is easy, but for those who are stuck, there’s Taylor Humphrey.

Humphrey, a 33-year-old NYU graduate, helped name over 100 children last year, according to a recent profile in the New Yorker.

For (US) $1,500, she generates a “bespoke name list” based on a questionnaire her clients fill out. The price goes up to (US)$10,000 for monikers that are “on-brand with a parent’s business.”

In 2015, she was hit with “a bout of writer’s block” while writing a screenplay, but Humphrey still needed an outlet for her creative energy. So she created her Instagram account, “What’s in a Baby Name.”

“To my surprise, name nerds from across the globe were connecting online over this shared passion,” Humphrey told the Toronto Sun. “It was really the support of this community that gave me the confidence to speak more publicly about my love of baby names.”

She found the more she shared, the more it resonated with expecting parents, and the business grew intuitively from there. She began taking clients in 2018 and her business has grown ever since.

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For Humphrey, whose inspiration comes from “movie credits, street signs, and birth announcements,” her process for coming up with options “comes down to identifying the key pillars of a family’s life, and helping them to dig deep to find the buried treasures.”

Humphrey, who also works as a doula, revealed: “I take a really thoughtful approach to the names I suggest, and they are based on who the family is, and who they intuitively feel their child will be. The ethos of my business is helping parents ‘discover’ their babies’ names.”

Common reasons parents turn to Humphrey include a disagreement over a name, they’ve exhausted all apparent options, and they just don’t love the names they’ve come up with for their other children.

Yes, baby name regret is a thing.

Several questions factor into finding the right name: Who is this little spirit going to be in the world? What family are they coming into, and what are their values? What does their life look like?

“Without getting too esoteric, I do believe each person has a unique energetic signature,” Humphrey said. “Everyone has a soul, a vibe.”