There Is A Woman In San Francisco Charging Silicon Valley Couples $30,000 To Help Name Their Babies, and Her Business Is Booming!

San Francisco Chronicle - Taylor A. Humphrey, with her blond highlights, camera-ready smile, well-lit videos and knack for going viral, is the model TikTok-era entrepreneur. But to some of her critics, she’s also the living embodiment of the Bay Area’s tech-fueled excess: an influencer catering to the uber-wealthy with a boutique business that sounds like satire. 

“It’s a little embarrassing when you get made fun of on the internet,” said Humphrey, who’s based in San Francisco. “But at the same time, I’m like, ‘Well, it is silly.’ I come up with baby names for a living.” 

Humphrey didn’t set out to build a luxury baby-naming enterprise. When she started posting online a decade ago about her baby-name obsession, she was just hoping for a distraction from one of her life’s bleakest periods. The 37-year-old Humphrey now has 100,000 combined followers on TikTok and Instagram, and an ever-expanding portfolio of more than 500 children’s names she helped select. Her “bespoke” naming services cost up to $30,000.

At a time when finding the perfect name can often feel like a high-stakes exercise in “baby branding,” Humphrey is one of a dozen or so professional baby-name consultants nationwide whose full-time job is to guide expectant parents along their naming journey. She’s also believed to be the only one in the Bay Area, where affluence and an innovative ethos make it one of this niche industry’s top markets. 

For some moneyed parents, choosing a name is no different than selecting a kitchen backsplash: personal, yes, but best outsourced to a pro. Humphrey’s clientele tends to span everyone from high-profile celebrities to the anonymously rich. Regardless of the intricacies of their naming needs, she promises to have the ideal package.

As anybody who even half paid attention during high-school world history class can tell you, the fall of the Roman Empire was well-documented. And very prolonged. Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder could have seen it coming. 

Gladiators fighting tigers, orgies in marble palaces, emperors lighting their gardens with human torches. The rich treating themselves to "bacchanals" where they literally force fed themselves the finest meats, cheeses, fruits, and delicacies from all around the empire, just so they could then vomit into a trough, and continue eating again. All while their subjects starved and fought over stale bread. You could say there was a bit of wild excess.

And it would appear that we’ve officially got our modern version of that excess. Except instead of orgies and lions, we’ve got Silicon Valley couples paying thirty grand for someone to name their kid.

Yes, Rome burned while Nero played the fiddle. America’s burning while some influencer named Taylor is on TikTok saying, “For $30,000, I’ll make sure your baby’s name has good vibes.”

Thirty thousand bucks for a name. Are we fucking serious? 

There isn' a name in the world that's worth that. That’s a down payment on a house. For thirty grand, the name better come with a trust fund, a 401k, and a guaranteed spot at Stanford.

Parents used to just pick a name they liked. Your grandfather would come home from the factory covered in soot, sit at the kitchen table, takes one drag of his cigarette, and go,

“He looks like a Paul.”

Done. Papers signed. Baby named. Zero dollars spent.

But today, these tech bros are acting like they’re IPO-ing a startup instead of naming a human. They’re probably sitting there on Zoom calls like,

“Net net, we’re looking for a name that says visionary entrepreneur but also sustainable eco-warrior, with just a touch of crypto disruptor who might flee to Dubai if the SEC comes knocking.”

And their wives are even worse. You already know that they’re up at three in the morning scrolling through Instagram, terrified that little Emily is going to get dragged online for being too basic.

“Babe, we can’t name her Emily! Emily’s are the girls who grow up to work in HR!”

So they hire this snake oil saleswoman woman like she’s the LeBron James of baby names. They’re paying for “vibes” now. Literally. 

For some moneyed parents, choosing a name is no different than selecting a kitchen backsplash: personal, yes, but best outsourced to a pro. Humphrey’s clientele tends to span everyone from high-profile celebrities to the anonymously rich. Regardless of the intricacies of their naming needs, she promises to have the ideal package. Just want an email with some personalized baby-name recommendations? That’ll be $200. Need something far more in-depth? Any of her higher-end services, which start at $10,000, amount to the “VIP treatment.”

Add-on features include a “baby name branding” campaign, a genealogical investigation designed to ferret out old family names, even a think tank to discuss the top naming options. As Humphrey notes on her official website, the only limits are “your own imagination.”

She gives them a list with meanings, origins, popularity trends, and a whole branding strategy. 

Yes. Branding! For a baby!

Your kid comes out of the womb with a LinkedIn profile.

That's not even wildest part about this SF Chronicle article. Some couple in Texas couldn’t agree on a middle name, so they were stuck in the hospital for over a week because they refused to sign the birth certificate. 

Adrianne Holland, a luxury real estate agent from Fort Worth, Texas, had just given birth to her daughter, Mara, when she FaceTimed Humphrey last year in a panic. Though Mara was happy and healthy despite arriving three weeks early, Holland couldn’t get released from the hospital until she filled out the birth certificate.

The problem: She and her husband, Bowie, couldn’t decide on Mara’s middle name. Bowie insisted on his grandmother’s name, Priscilla, which Holland abhorred. The more time passed without a solution, the more Holland feared becoming another baby-naming horror story.

Holland said that years earlier, after two of her close friends had their first child together, they became so deadlocked on the name issue that they refused to complete the birth certificate. More than a week passed without them being allowed to leave the hospital. With insurance refusing to cover the extended stay, Holland said, the couple’s medical bill totaled more than $300,000.

Insurance wouldn’t cover it. Three hundred grand in hospital bills- all because Daddy wanted “Priscilla” and Mommy said, “Over my dead body.”

This is how you know our society’s circling the drain. Somewhere in rural America, a baby’s being born in the back of a pickup truck, and named Daisy on the spot, and everyone’s fine. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a baby’s in a neonatal hostage situation because mommy and daddy are deadlocked between “Locket Romance” and “Slim Easy.”

This whole thing isn’t even about names sadly. It’s about how detached these people are from reality. The average American is out here praying they can just afford fucking diapers. While some tech bro is venmoing a stranger thirty racks to make sure his kid’s name “pops” on Instagram.

And I kinda get it. If you’re in Silicon Valley, you need a strong name. When little Apple Martin is applying to Harvard in fifteen years, you don’t want her competing against a kid named “Crypto P. Blockchain.” Because that kid’s getting the scholarship.

This is exactly how empires fall. Rome had gladiators and decadent feasts, and we’ve got gluten-free charcuterie boards and baby-naming consultants. Different props, but same show.

The only difference is that when Rome collapsed, at least their kids had names that sounded badass, like Augustus and Maximus. When America goes down, historians are going to be sifting through the rubble like,

“Ah, yes, here lies Rumble Honey Zuckerberg… truly a tragic figure of our time.”