Who Is Eden Frost?

The URL of this website is whoisedenfrost.com, which requires a small explanation.

When I started building it, the first thing I did was try to buy edenfrost.com.

It was taken.

Not by another person named Eden Frost. Not by a musician or an author or someone who'd beaten me to establishing a personal brand. It belonged to a copywriting agency in Amsterdam. They'd owned it since 2009.

I found another domain. Problem solved.

Except it wasn't, really.

Because once I knew there was a company called EdenFrost, I needed to know why.

Not in any practical sense. The answer wasn't going to change anything. But there is something unsettling about discovering that your name already exists out in the world, detached from you, doing its own thing. Like finding a stranger living in a house with your address.

So I started looking.

EdenFrost is a small English-Dutch translation and copywriting agency. I combed through the website looking for an explanation. A founder story. An About page. A throwaway line somewhere about where the name came from.

Nothing.

The team page listed people by first name only. Tamar. Joanne. Sarah. Ed.

No Frosts. No Edens.

LinkedIn gave me surnames. Still nothing.

At that point I developed a theory. The company had been around since 2009, which meant there was plenty of time for founders to come and go. Maybe Eden and Frost were surnames. Maybe the company was named after people who no longer worked there. It happens all the time. Law firms are full of dead mysteries like that.

I developed a second theory too, mostly because I know almost nothing about Dutch culture. Maybe Eden Frost meant something in Dutch. Maybe it was a phrase, a reference, an idiom that hadn't translated.

I asked Google. I asked ChatGPT. I asked Claude.

Nothing.

One theory dead. One still alive.

The obvious next step was incorporation records.

I found the company's listing in the Dutch business registry. The documents I wanted cost three euros.

Three euros is not a lot of money.

But there is a certain point in any investigation where spending money forces you to admit you're investigating something, and I wasn't ready for that yet.

So instead I opened the Wayback Machine.

The oldest versions of the website were frustratingly inaccessible. Broken snapshots from the early 2010s. Dead ends. Eventually I stopped trying to start at the beginning and worked backwards from the present instead.

Around 2018, I found a version I could actually read.

The About page listed former employees who no longer appeared on the current site. One of them was named Colleen. Under her name: Co-Founder.

Progress. Or so I thought.

By that point, I'd found both co-founders' names. Neither of them was Eden. Neither of them was Frost. I'd managed to disprove my best remaining theory without getting any closer to an answer. It felt like one step forward, two steps back. I had names now, but in terms of explaining the company name, I was essentially back at square one.

I kept digging.

An older version described Colleen as Canadian. An even older version described Tamar as “Canada-born and Amsterdam-smitten.”

Two Canadian founders.

At this point I should mention that I'm Canadian too.

This was not evidence of anything. It simply felt statistically strange. Here were two Canadians who'd moved to Amsterdam, started a language business, and somehow landed on the exact combination of words my parents had already given me as a name.

The longer I looked, the harder it became to tell whether I was researching the company or my own name.

Names are odd things. Most of us spend our entire lives inhabiting one without ever learning how it came into existence. Someone chooses a collection of sounds before you've done anything to deserve them. Then you spend the next few decades growing into them.

The founders had chosen Eden Frost.

My parents had chosen Eden Frost.

I wanted to know why.

Eventually I ran out of places to look. So I emailed them.

The subject line was: “A slightly unusual question about your name.”

Then I waited. Two days passed. I'd started to make peace with never knowing. Then my laptop pinged and I almost didn't look. When I did, there it was: a reply from projects@edenfrost.com. From EdenFrost. To Eden Frost. Tamar had written back.

The answer, it turned out, was surprisingly simple.

Frost came from the poet Robert Frost.

Eden came from a hotel business card sitting in Tamar's wallet. The Eden Hotel Group.

The words felt right together. Warm and cold. Life and death. Opposites in balance.

There was another influence too. Their first office shared a building with an agency called Watson & Lewis. Tamar liked the rhythm of it. Two words. Professional. Slightly ambiguous. A name that sounded established before anyone knew what the company actually did.

So my theories weren't completely wrong.

The law-firm theory survived in spirit. The company wasn't named after people, but it was inspired by companies that were. And my final fallback theory, that perhaps they simply liked how the words sounded together, turned out to be almost exactly correct.

The Robert Frost connection should have been obvious. Two writers naming a language business after a poet. I missed it entirely.

Tamar also told me that part of the appeal was choosing a name that wasn't overtly feminine. Something that would be taken seriously in an industry dominated by men.

I understood that immediately.

There was something strangely affirming about hearing someone describe my own name as capable, professional, and a little androgynous. As if I'd accidentally stumbled into a focus group for my identity.

Before signing off, Tamar asked how my parents came up with my name.

The answer, like many things in this story, is surprisingly simple. They'd had a professor in grad school whose daughter was born a few months before me. He named her Eden. My parents liked the sound of it — “unusual but not weird” — and thought it paired well with Frost.

No poet. No hotel business card.

Just a coincidence so specific that it almost stops feeling like one.

Two Canadians moved to Amsterdam and built a company from a poet and a scrap of cardstock. Years later, another Canadian ended up living abroad under the exact same name and spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out why.

I suppose that's the thing about investigations.

Sometimes you arrive at the answer you're looking for.

Sometimes you arrive at a story about why you were looking in the first place.

Either way, the case is closed.

Thanks, Tamar.