, has undergone a name change.
So, what’s in a name? What makes a name change successful, and how do companies go about a change without losing brand identity?
Impart meaning
Sometimes, all it takes is a minor tweak, such as when Utah-based bicycle brand Fezzari Bicycles dropped the “Fezz” to become Ari Bicycles in March.
Jordan Washburn, director of sales at Ari, says it wasn’t necessarily that the name Fezzari wasn’t working for the company. Rather, company leadership felt Ari was a better name to take the company into the future.
That decision is not one to be taken lightly. “It’s not because you get bored of your name or logo; it’s not a spur-of-the-moment or on-a-whim decision,” Washburn says. The rebrand had been discussed within the company for years.
Washburn believes the logical and phonetic connection between the two names helps preserve brand identity. “Yes, it is a name change, but when we talk to people, really it’s the same name,” he says. “It’s like Joshua to Josh or Nicholas to Nick; Jonathan to John. It’s the same name, just shortened.”
While Fezzari is a made-up name, Ari is a real word that means “to exist” or “to be.” Washburn says this fits the company’s vision and the value of bicycling to a life lived in the moment.
Make it searchable
Learning company Infini-D, which rebranded to Mission.io earlier this year, underwent a more drastic name change.
The company specializes in learning games for kids, which are called “missions.” While Infini-D’s branding was great with kids, co-founder Skyler Carr says it wasn’t passing the test for teacher referrals.
“When a teacher says, ‘Hey, have you heard of…’ when talking to a colleague, that’s really powerful. Infini-D fails the test there,” Carr says, saying that if that colleague went to search for the company with the traditional spelling of “Infinity,” nothing would come up.
”We created a barrier for ourselves right there,” Carr says.
Though Carr says he will always love the name Infini-D because it got the company going, a change was needed. For about a year, Carr thought of different names and would sit with each of them for 24 hours. None of them passed the 24-hour test until “Mission.”
“When you hear your employees say, ‘I work at Mission,’ that’s really cool. It passed the test,” Carr says.
Give it some breathing room
Airborne ECS rebranded to Intergalactic in 2021 after narrowing a broad list of potential names from a branding agency. Funny enough, “Intergalactic” wasn’t the team’s top choice.
“When they first presented it to us, they had some really wild ones … Intergalactic was more in the middle,” says founder and CEO Brian McCann. But similar to how Mission.io’s Carr sat with new company names for 24 hours, Intergalactic’s branding agency said to wait two weeks. After that time period, the name stuck.
“I couldn’t believe it,” McCann says. “When we came back, everyone on my team said Intergalactic was the one that stuck out — every single person.”
From there, McCann says it was clear that the branding they’d developed for Airborne ECS didn’t match the new company name. It was time to rethink everything.
“It was like, ‘Look, now we’ve defined the brand, we know what the guts look like, we know who we are,” McCann says.
