It’s hard to imagine that Amazon wasn’t called “Amazon,” but it wasn’t the first name Jeff Bezos chose before his company became a global e-commerce giant, as well as a hardware manufacturer, media distributor, retailer, ebooks, and maternity of Amazon Web Services, a service that was born to support Amazon.com and is today a leading company in the field of cloud computing.

The first name of Bezos’ company when he moved it to Seattle in 1994 was a far cry from what we eventually know. The chosen name was “Cadabra, Inc.“, orA reference to “abracadabra” suggesting that using a trade would work like a charm, pAccording to what they say in the bookShop for everything” by American journalist Brad Stone, which is considered one of the most comprehensive biographies of the founder and the company that made one of the first and biggest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we read and shop.

“Cadabra” did not last long there. Just a few months after moving to Seattle, the company’s lawyer heard the name sound like a “corpse,” and when Bezos heard it, he decided to look for a new name. The executive and his wife bet on relentless.com, but the chronicles say he sounded too “hostile”. Other names considered at the time were “Awake.com” and “browser.com”. These three brands still redirect to Amazon.com.

Why Amazon?

Before Google Search completely dominated Internet search, ranking at the top of alphabetical lists mattered a lot. This is what led Bezos to come up with another name for his company: “Aard.” But it wasn’t even he who stayed.

Finally, the executive pulled out a dictionary and liked “amazon” because it sounded like it “exotic and other”. The Amazon is not only the name of a tropical rainforest, but also the largest river in the world. Remember, at the time the company was essentially a bookseller, but Bezos planned to turn it into the world’s largest online bookstore. Not content to just be a bookseller, its visionary founder wanted Amazon to become a one-stop shop for everything, offering unlimited and enticing selection at rock-bottom prices.

To this end, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and mystery, which Stone tries to unravel in the book, where he talks about many curiosities and the company’s name. Bezos felt it the brand was important to his company and he thought about it many times until he chose the final one that got this far. The rest is history. Millions of people still buy e-books on Amazon.com, but today it’s only a small part of everything it sells. Not to mention services and that of AWS, which in itself is already a great company leading global cloud computing.