Eat My Words

Boastful Bios

Everyone on the Eat My Words team is a rockstar.

— Alexandra Watkins, Chief Innovation Officer
— Mik Seipier, Left Brain
— Gina Sorell, Sous Chef
— Shannon Dejong, Linguist
— Caroline Leavitt, Sous Chef
— Rena Wessels, Office Manager

Alexandra Watkins – Founder & Chief Innovation Officer

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 for 20+ years, 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 31 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 amusing photo album, “My Take on China.”

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.”

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."

Caroline Leavitt – Sous Chef

Our resident Mom and kid expert, Caroline “Ruby Sneakers” Leavitt is a natural born namer. She not only changed her first name at age 17 (don't ask), but she's been conjuring names, people, and places since she could hold a Crayola. Wacky about words, frenetic about phrasing, it was a natural for Caroline to enter the name game though Macy's where she named everything from kids' dressing rooms to men's suits and daringly showed up at haute couture meetings wearing plastic pig earrings and glittery pink high tops. She’s now having even more fun naming anything animal, vegetable, mineral, or alien for Eat My Words.

An award-winning author of eight novels, (most recently Girls in Trouble), four of which were optioned for the Silver Screen, Caroline has been profiled in the New York Times and on The Today Show twice. When she’s not dreaming up names for Eat my Words, Caroline teaches an advanced course in novel writing through UCLA. She also mentors writers and reviews books for Dame Magazine, People, and The Boston Globe. And she writes a blog.

Caroline lives in a 130-year-old row house in New York City’s unofficial sixth borough, Hoboken, with her writer husband, Jeff Tamarkin, and their writer son, Max, who wrote his first novel last year at the advanced age of ten.

Shannon Dejong – Linguist

Our on-call linguist, Shannon Dejong double majored in linguistics and mass communications at Berkeley, where she did an Honors Thesis with Ian Maddison, the world-renowned phonetician, and took Metaphor classes with George Lakeoff, a master of CogSci work on how language works in the brain. Great preparation for work in naming.

While in school, Shannon did linguistic research and naming with Landor SF, where she developed some proprietary research is still being used today for clients such as Boeing, Texaco, YWCA, and others. She continued to work with Landor after graduation, naming for clients such as PepsiCo, Adobe, FritoLay, and others.

At SALT Branding, Shannon was a Verbal Brand Consultant, where she developed naming creative and copy for major brands such as Disney, Mobile 365 and Sprint's new Embarq (a name that makes everyone at Eat My Words cringe). She’s worked on over 100 projects for Microsoft, participating in everything from developing strategy, naming architectures, writing proposals, creating naming and creative briefs, coming up with names, building and polishing presentations decks, interfacing with clients, to delivering the presentation. She is an invaluable resource to Eat My Words.

An ex-gymnast, Shannon is not opposed to doing backflips, much to the amusement of our clients.

Rena Wessels – Office Manager

Affectionately known as "Super Girl Friday," Rena's super powers include, but are not limited to: answering the phone with a cheerful voice, even on Mondays; filing faster than you can say "paper cut"; able to unravel finances without using scissors; supersonic vision that typos and lost information can't hide from; and a supernatural intuitive ability to create cocktail concoctions. She also dances a mean tango and swing.

Rena (who will absolutely not let us call her "Greena"), recently re-re-relocated to the Golden State after doing time for a few years in the Big Apple, where she got the bug for creative writing and green living. She boasts organic garden in her backyard and is obsessed with turning a 1965 Volvo Amazon into a hybrid vehicle. Much to our enjoyment, Rena loves to whip up fresh fruit and vegetable smoothies in the Eat My Words kitchen and take home the scraps for her composting.