Names that Are Bad for Business, Canada

These two winning business or product names are from Montreal, though only one is in French.


Fashion is a culture where I can't tell the winks from the blinks, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, but "bodybag" seems like a name to avoid in any Western culture.


This wine, called Pisse-Dru, is just one of those language things that happens, like the Chevy Nova car, whose name mean "no go" in Spanish. Pisse is just never going to sell to an Anglophone audience, but maybe that's part of the point in Quebec. I guess it translates as something like "the juice looks very concentrated." Okay, then!