What’s in a name? A value of $30,000, apparently.
Wealthy parents-to-be are spending tens of thousands of dollars to hire a “professional baby namer” to help them dub their new addition.
Taylor A. Humphrey started posting online about a decade ago about her obsession with baby names — and now it’s a whole luxurious enterprise.
“There’s a lot more to this job than people realize,” Humphrey, who was named after 1980s soap opera actress Taylor Miller, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Sometimes, I get calls from clients that are so urgent that I need to drop everything and help them right away.”
The San Fran-based consultant helped name more than 100 babies in 2020, raking in more than $150,000 from cashed-up couples — back when she charged just $1,500 for the service.
Now, Humphrey, 37, has 100,000 combined followers on TikTok and Instagram, as well as a growing portfolio of more than 500 children’s monikers she helped choose, with services now costing up to $30,000, the SF Chronicle reported.
Humphrey is a trained doula with a background in branding and marketing, and she’s also a self-described “name nerd” with thousands of spreadsheets full of baby names.
When taking on clients, she uses naming questionnaires to get a better understanding of the parents’ personalities, interests, and likes and dislikes when it comes to names.
Those who want a simple email with some personalized name recommendations — which include each name’s meanings, origins, spelling variations, popularity history, and “vibes” — will need to shell out at least $200.
But Humphrey‘s more in-depth services start at $10,000, which gets parents the “VIP treatment.”
Her add-on services include things such as “identifying a unique name aesthetic,” “baby name branding,” getting a genealogist to compose a list of names from old parts of the family tree, or even hiring a think tank to discuss options.
The requests from her client have become more specific over the years, with parents-to-be asking for names that are uncommon but not weird, simple but not basic, and on trend but not too trendy.
During video consultations, she often finds that she can feel more like a therapist or mediator than a baby-name consultant.
She has a range of clientele, from the anonymously rich to high-profile celebrities, who seek out assistance to find the perfect name for their baby, which can feel high-stakes.
Humphrey declined to reveal her estimated income from her career, but shared that she has a backlog of clients ever since the New Yorker profiled her in 2021.
She is one of just about a dozen professional baby-name consultants nationwide with a full-time gig to help parents name their children — and she’s believed to be the only one in the Bay Area.
After the New Yorker profile went viral and Humphrey’s social media blew up, it allowed her to gain plenty of clients and increase her pricing — despite mockery online.
“I had to come to terms with the fact that people often find me through content that pokes fun at me,” Humphrey said. “I accept it because I believe the work I’m doing is really important.”
“It’s a little embarrassing when you get made fun of on the internet,” she said. “But at the same time, I’m like, ‘Well, it is silly.’ I come up with baby names for a living.”
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