Oprah Winfrey's holding company "Harpo Entertainment" is her name spelled backwards.
There really was a Wendy (Wendys), a Sara Lee and an Orville Redenbacher, but never a Betty Crocker.
Green Giant Foods is named after the mascot, not the other way around. The company was originally the Minnesota Valley Canning Company.
Kodak is a word invented by George Eastman. His mother told him that companies whose names start with a letter having "genuine character" will succeed. He thought K had that honest ring to it so the word begins and ends in K.
"Pepsi" was so called because it was supposed to have a beneficial effect on the digestive system (Making it a distant cousin to Pepcid AC) while Coca-Cola originally contained coca leaves, the source of Cocaine. Both of those and Dr. Pepper were all designed as tonics and sold in drug stores. Think about this the next time you get a coke that lost its fizz...the original Coca-Cola was not a carbonated beverage.
"Stanley Steemer" carpet cleaning deliberately misspelled "Steamer" so they could copyright the distinctive name. That's the same strategy behind Intel stopping numbered microprocessors after the "486".
While this is not a company name, the Wizard of Oz got its place name when L. Frank Baum was sitting in the doctor's office and saw his files in two drawers, A-N / O-Z. The original explorer was a boy but when his neighbor's daughter, a little girl named Dorothy, lay dying of fever, he substituted her identity for the child caught up in the tornado and told her the story. He kept the change intact in her memory.
