Jay Jurisich
Founder / Creative Director
The founder and chief naming strategist behind Zinzin, Jay has 25 years of experience as a professional namer. As Creative Director of Zinzin, Jay is involved in all aspects of all Zinzin projects for our extensive list of clients.
Prior to Zinzin Jay was the co-founder and creative director for nine years of the naming agency Igor, and before that, Jay was the Editorial Director at the naming agency A Hundred Monkeys. Jay was also the founder of the early-Internet free naming and branding website Wordlab.
Jay is always thinking about names and naming, leads all Zinzin naming projects, and is happy to guide you through the process of creating the killer name for your company or product. He has also been a speaker about naming issues at a number of conferences and is always up for interesting experiences and collaborations.
Ali Sell
Naming Associate / Sr. Copywriter
Ali is a dynamo copywriter and a namer at heart. She brings two decades of brand and marketing communications expertise from strategy to execution and all the good stuff in between. Ali has worked on numerous Zinzin naming projects and writes for Zinzin’s award-winning blog on diverse, real world naming topics.
Before joining Zinzin as a naming and copywriting contractor/collaborator, Ali was a freelance copywriter with a deep agency background. She’s written extensively for digital and print media – including naming, brand language, and traditional advertising copy – for a range of clients, such as Coca-Cola, Brooklyn Bridge Marina, and The High Line.
When Ali’s brain isn’t in creative mode, she’s sleeping. When she’s sleeping, she’s dreaming of tacos.
Betsy Finegan
Operations Director / Naming & Research Associate
As Zinzin’s Operations Director, Betsy makes sure projects are flowing smoothly and provides the behind-the-scenes glue that holds Zinzin together. Like all of us here at Zinzin, Betsy also works on naming projects as a namer and researcher.
In her past work lives Betsy has been the operations manager for a top San Francisco digital video post-production house (Varitel), a leading music mastering studio in the heart of Hollywood (Precision Mastering), and a gourmet coffee roasting company (EuroCoffee). She has also worked as a freelance media producer, a production assistant in film and television (Emmy Awards), and as a fine artist.
Betsy is a natural namer and can beat everyone here hands down at scrabble and solving crossword puzzles.