Eat My Words

Boastful Bios

Everyone on the Eat My Words team is a rockstar.

Alexandra Watkins, Chief Innovation Officer
Mik Seipier, Left Brain
Rena Wessels, Resident Sous Chef
Gina Sorell, Sous Chef
Monica Scalf, Sous Chef

Alexandra Watkins – Founder & Chief Innovation Officer

A recent winner in the Make Mine a Million $ Business program sponsored by American Express, Alexandra has turned her passion for naming things into a thriving company.

Alexandra first got hooked on naming when Gap hired her to create cheeky names for their first line of body care products. Soon after, she broke into the business by weaseling her way into Landor via a Match.com date. With her fresh, unconventional naming style, Alexandra soon became a go-to resource for countless branding and naming firms around the country. And Landor sent her enough business to open her own firm. Since then, she’s generated thousands of names for snacks, software, sunscreen, social networking sites, sportswear, shoes, sugar scrubs, serums, and seafood. (And that’s just the S’s!) She’s also named lots of things that make you fat and drunk including a nationally recognized bacon cheeseburger (which ironically, must remain nameless) and no less than 4 vodkas.

Prior to Eat My Words, Alexandra was an advertising copywriter, working at leading ad agencies up and down the West Coast, including five years at Oglivy and Mather, where she helped pimp everything from Microsoft to Mighty Dog. In the mid-nineties she jumped on the dot com gravy train, and rode it until it crashed in her SOMA backyard. Alexandra took the money and ran, spending a year in Australia, New Zealand, Bali and Fiji disguised as a 21-year old backpacker. Upon her return, she reinvented herself as a namer and started Eat My Words. Alexandra gets her passport stamped as often as possible. She has eaten her way through 40 countries, where she’s sunk her teeth into local delicacies including barbequed squirrel in Tanzania, ostrich carpaccio in South Africa and stewed camel meat in Libya. Her favorite food is JIF peanut butter, which she once survived on for two days on the remote island of Amantani in Lake Titicaca, Peru. She is an excellent photographer as documented in her latest, “Photo Album from Cuba.”

Mik Seipier – Left Brain

Known as the “left brain” of Eat My Words, Mik Seipier may be the only naming professional in the world whose personal hero is Luca Pacioli, the 14th century friar who codified double-entry bookkeeping. Blessed with a world-class case of ADD (before it was hip), Mik has discovered that creative naming works well with his pinball mind, finding associations and naming avenues that mesh well with Eat My Words’ evocative naming style. With a MBA and a background in finance, Mik looks beyond the name itself to see the potential to enhance the overall profitability of the company, with the name becoming one of its most valuable assets. Return On Investment for brand names is a major interest of Mik’s and he is working on algorithms to quantify it. In fact it was Mik who came up with the now famous equation, “EMW = ROI.”

On any given day, Mik may wake up his brain by ideating creative names or taglines for a new consumer product, an hour later be teaching a finance class on the wonders of the effects of variable costs on breakeven analysis, and finish up the day throwing down Boolean searches at the USPTO’s trademark database or writing a biting blog entry for The Kitchen Sink.

Working on hundreds of naming/tagline projects for many leading naming/branding agencies over the last several years has allowed Mik to not only be aware of naming trends and processes (and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors), but also what name types and processes stand the test of time. Due to stringent NDA’s and his inherent fear of certified letters and a guy named Vito, the companies he has worked for and names he developed that others took credit for, shall ironically remain nameless. We believe Mik may in fact be in the Witness Protection Program, hiding out in Oregon, disguised as a lumberjack.

Mik remains most proud of his first naming assignment at age six, coming up with the name for his dog, “Steve Johnson.”

Rena Wessels – Resident Sous Chef

Originally hired as our "Super Girl Friday," Rena quickly impressed us with her naming prowess, most notably "Maybe Baby," a telling name for a home pregnancy test. In the past two years, Rena has put her right brain to work on naming projects from champagne to cleaning companies. Her super powers also include, but are not limited to: investigative research, chasing down checks, and expertly screening phone calls to weed out looky-loos. She also dances a mean tango and swing.

Rena (who will absolutely not let us call her "Greena"), re-relocated to the Golden State after doing time in the Big Apple, where she got the bug for creative writing and green living. She boasts an organic garden in her postage-stamp sized backyard and is obsessed with turning a 1965 Volvo Amazon into a hybrid vehicle. Her beloved Great Dane, Sofie (aka "Get Off The Couch,") started at Eat My Words around the same time Rena did and now weighs more than Alexandra.

Gina Sorell – Sous Chef

Affectionately referred to as "Hollywood" by the EMW team, actress/writer/namer Gina Sorell (who at one time was known simply as "Jinxy"), is an urban hipster who has her finger on the pulse of what's hot and hip in Los Angeles, Manhattan, Toronto and beyond. A Second City alumna, Gina is fast on her feet, and swears that improvising and inventing new names is really the same thing (although the latter can be done without the presence of drunken crowds and the smell of chicken wings). Since joining the EMW team last year, Gina has contributed her creativity to countless projects, naming everything from vodka to snack foods to technology, which is rather appropriate considering that "simultaneously drinking, eating and writing on my laptop," are listed under the "Special Skills" section of her resume. Gina's cheeky name for an acne medication, "Later, Crater," led to our first annual April Fools Day presentation, resulting in a big laugh from favorite client, Guthy-Renker.

Gina's acting has taken her all over the world and has given her a broad perspective and knowledge of people, places and things that many other namers can only dream about. And being on the other side of the camera, has given Gina a unique insight into pitching and naming as she has been the face of over 30 national commercial and voiceover campaigns.

Recently Gina just finished her debut novel, a hilarious and heart warming adult coming of age story entitled "Navel Gazing."

Monica Scalf – Sous Chef

At first glance, she may appear "vanilla," but don't be fooled by Monica Scalf's suburban Midwestern life. Born and raised in the heartland, she's married to her high school sweetheart, runs a mean carpool, and can fold laundry one handed while watching Oprah and quizzing either one of her two all American kids.

Ordinary, maybe, but she's an expert at finding the extra whether generating names for CPG brands, fueling her wildly popular blog The Ordinary Matters, booking events for her creative learning company The Playground Group, or writing her humor column for The Cincinnati Enquirer. As a former English Professor and constant lover of words, her favorite job is naming all things kids, family, and fun for Eat My Words.

Logging hundreds of hours in the aisles of neighborhood grocery stores and wandering around mega malls, Monica is in touch with the modern mom and the names that call out from the endless shelves of possibilities.

Among her recent naming feats is titling her first book, Live in the Little: 52 Ways to Find the Extra in the Ordinary.