Starbucks nearly had a much worse name. The first choice was Pequod, the doomed whaling ship in Moby-Dick. It lost out, and the ship's first mate took its place.
The company was founded in Seattle in 1971 by three partners: Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker. Wikipedia dates the founding to March 30, 1971. The first store opened near Pike Place Market.
To name it, the founders worked with Terry Heckler, an artist and a business partner of Bowker's. According to the company's own history, they wanted a name that suggested adventure, the Pacific Northwest and the seafaring early coffee traders.
Bowker proposed Pequod. Heckler objected to how it sounded. The Starbucks account has him asking whether anyone would buy a cup of "Pee-kwod."
Heckler also had a theory that words beginning with "st" sounded strong. According to Wikipedia, the founders went looking for "st" words. While looking at names of old mining camps around Mount Rainier, Heckler came across "Starbo." Wikipedia says this was a misreading of Storbo, a mining town in the Cascades named after Peter Storbo, a mining company president.
Starbo led the group back to Melville. Starbuck is the Pequod's chief mate, the steady voice who argues against Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale. The founders added an "s" and had their name.
How much the book mattered is a matter of emphasis. Britannica says plainly that the company was named after the character. Bowker himself played the link down. As Wikipedia quotes him, Moby-Dick "didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly," and the fit of the sound was "only coincidental."
Either way, the nautical theme carried into the logo, a two-tailed siren. The company has said it came from a 16th-century Norse woodcut. A medievalist writing in Slate doubted that, and traced a likely source to a 15th-century German book.