This CEO Just Rebranded His B2B Company. It’s a Lesson in Manifesting

With a new name, Everpure is stepping into its next era with expanded offerings.

BY STEPHANIE MEHTA, CEO AND CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER OF MANSUETO VENTURES, PARENT OF INC. AND FAST COMPANY @STEPHANIEMEHTA

[Images: Everpure, Trondol Icon/Adobe Stock]

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

During Charles Giancarlo’s first all-hands meeting after becoming CEO of Pure Storage in 2017, an employee asked: “How long are we going to keep the name Pure Storage?” The question suggested that having “storage” in the company’s name limited the range of products and services it could offer customers.

“My response at the time was, ‘We can think about a new name as soon as we start doing something other than storage,’” Giancarlo recalls.

Though the company may be best known for its data storage platform—including its all-flash hardware that uses ultraefficient flash memory modules instead of spinning hard drives—Giancarlo is pushing the Santa Clara, Calif.-based tech concern into data management. Today, he unveiled a new name, Everpure, reflecting his ambition to deliver a broader array of products and services to enterprises.

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A brand by any other name

The Everpure moniker preserves the brand equity of “Pure” from the original company name. “Ever” nods to the company’s Evergreen storage-as-a-subscription program. A new logo retains the Pure Storage logomark, and the company’s ticker symbol, PSTG, remains unchanged.

Renaming a company isn’t cheap—brand management platform Frontify estimates that a complete brand overhaul can cost companies $1 million or more. And while consumer branding changes are often hotly debated (hello, Cracker Barrel), business-to-business (B2B) marketing moves rarely elicit more than a shrug. Giancarlo himself says it is unlikely that anyone will be talking about the name change a year from now.

But an enterprise rebranding can help reframe a company’s remit for employees, investors, and prospective customers. Indeed, Giancarlo believes the new name will help open doors with chief data officers and AI strategists. “The person who cares about data management inside our customers is different from the persona that cares about data storage,” he explains. “And when they hear the name Pure Storage, they’re likely to say, ‘Oh, I don’t need to meet with them. They’re the storage people.’”

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