Baby name: Logan Jackson Dixon can thank the Starbucks crowd for his name

Baby name dilemma? An expecting Connecticut couple deadlocked over two names for their baby boy, due in September, put it to their local Starbucks crowd to decide. They got 2,000 votes, and Logan, it is.

Millions of Americans can’t start their day without their cup of Starbucks, but young expecting parents Jennifer James and Mark Dixon have taken their love of Starbucks to a new level: Naming their baby.

James and Dixon are happily expecting a baby boy in September, but they had a dilemma about what to name him. And Starbucks came to the rescue.  

“We had two names, but we were really stuck on them and we didn’t want to make any compromises,” says Mr. Dixon. The couple and their extended family were deadlocked over the names.

When the couple was at their New Haven, Conn. Starbucks recently and noticed employees voting on their employee of the month award, an idea popped into Dixon’s head: crowdsourcing through Starbucks.

“It was mostly [Jennifer’s] idea to put it out there like this,” Dixon admits, but they both agreed it would be a fun way to determine the name.
 They came up with a display consisting of a cup filled with slips of paper beside another cup decked out with baby blue footprints and handprints. Next to the cups, a small frame with the request, “Please help us choose our son’s first name, Logan or Jackson?” 

It took a few days to get noticed, and the couple  didn’t expect people to take it "this seriously,” but the simple question eventually drew more than 1,800 votes, not counting the couple of hundred ballots from people who voted more than once.  

Most votes were for one of the two choices provided, but Mom- and Dad- to-be received “a lot of hilarious votes,” says Dixon. “we got Barak Obama, Monarch Butterfly, Hulk Hogan. We even had Starbucks-related ones like cappuccino and latte.”

Despite the random suggestions, there was a clear-cut winner among those who took the contest seriously: Logan won by 500 or 600 votes, to the delight of Mommy James, who was rooting for the name Logan so that her son wouldn’t have a rhyming name – Jackson Dixon. 

The name was decided: Logan Jackson Dixon. While James is allowing her son’s middle name to be Jackson, despite the rhyming effect, a disagreement on spelling was not something she was willing to lose, so it was a good thing daddy Dixon was willing to compromise on that one. “I wanted Jaxon, but she wanted the traditional spelling, so I let her have it because she’s doing all the work right now.”

The expecting parents have even saved the ballots and newspaper clippings about their contest for Logan. But, after some public criticism about their high profile naming method, Dixon says they don’t plan to use it again – if Logan has a brother or sister.