BRANDING

Just Add “Just”

Nancy Friedman
6 min readOct 6, 2024

The four-letter word that’s all over supermarket shelves and advertising copy.

Six bottles of Just Ice Tea in different flavors
League of Just Ice.

Honest Tea was a beverage-industry success story: Founded in 1998 by a Yale University graduate student and one of his professors, the brand built a new market for organic, Fair Trade–certified, lightly sweetened ready-to-drink teas. The brand name, which sounded exactly like “honesty,” doubled as a mission statement.

In 2009, the New York Times reported that Honest Tea was President Obama’s favorite beverage. Sales spiked. When Coca-Cola bought Honest Tea in 2011, the founders reaped a windfall and the product reached a much broader market.

Then, in May 2022, Coca-Cola abruptly dropped the Honest Tea brand, citing supply-chain challenges. The announcement was “a gut punch,” tweeted co-founder Seth Goldman. But he didn’t waste time grieving: By September 2022 he’d launched a new organic-tea brand called Just Ice Tea. “You could read it as ‘justice tea’,” he told the Yale School of Management newsletter.

Just Ice Tea may be an organic-tea upstart, but its name joins a crowded field. From software to clothing, from insurance to cosmetics, from egg substitutes to wedding-planning services, JUST is one of the most popular modifiers in brand naming. I recently counted nearly 5,000 registered trademarks for brands called JUST in…

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Nancy Friedman

Writer, name developer, brand consultant, idea-ist, ex-journalist. @fritinancy on Mastodon, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, and elsewhere.