WorkPatterns is now Charma — a decision to rebrand

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve taken on the name Charma as we enter the next chapter of our company’s journey.

We made the decision to rebrand to better reflect our mission and values as a company, and the CHARMing and MAgical experience we strive to create for our users.

Our mission to guide more effective work relationships and the overall product direction are not changing — but the look and feel will be different. We’re pretty thrilled with how it all turned out and we hope you like it too.

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Why the name WorkPatterns no longer worked for us

The name WorkPatterns served us well early on, but our goal is to build an iconic company, and we wanted an iconic name to go along with that ambition. Of course, making a brand iconic isn’t just about picking the right combination of letters. It’s about how we make it come to life in the product, in our content, and most importantly through the interactions we have with our customers.

Rebranding a company is not an easy task and is not something we took on lightly. Ultimately though, this wasn’t a tough decision.

WorkPatterns was a good name to use while getting things off the ground. It was descriptive of what our product did (which is helpful when you’re validating your idea) and on a practical level, we already owned it.

That said, the name WorkPatterns had quite a few shortcomings that ultimately made the decision to rebrand an easy one:

1. It’s unmemorable and sounds vaguely similar to many other enterprise software products of the format Work______.
2. It’s long and prone to typos. I bet workpatters.com and workpattern.com get a good chunk of our direct traffic.
3. It’s camel case which results in inconsistent usage. Seeing Workpatterns vs WorkPatterns got me irrationally frustrated.
4. It ends in an ‘s’ which makes it awkward to spell and communicate the plurals and possessives. WorkPatterns’s will never look or sound right to me.

Perhaps most importantly, the name WorkPatterns didn’t feel authentic to the team’s personality or represent how we wanted people to feel when they used the product. There are plenty of tools in the enterprise software space that are well intentioned and solve important problems, but they’re so cumbersome to use that they fall flat with end users.

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Rebranding and our future as Charma

In becoming Charma, we’re taking the opposite approach. We’re trying to build a product that’s so delightful to use and so effortlessly helpful that managers and their teams elect to use it themselves without it being pushed on them. The name WorkPatterns sounds too much like… well, work. We wanted something more friendly, approachable, and uplifting.

After an extensive process where we evaluated hundreds of names, we landed on the name Charma, which we’re thrilled about. Here are some reasons why:

1. It’s short and clear.
2. There’s only one way to pronounce it.
3. It doesn’t have any trademark conflicts in our space (perhaps most importantly).
4. It’s evocative of an English word, which makes it easy to remember, but it’s still an “empty vessel” that we can create meaning around.
5. It’s reminiscent of the words “charm” and “magical” which have positive connotations. We aspire to embody those sentiments both in our product and in our interactions internally and externally.

We could own the url www.charma.com which is a pretty dope domain name if I may say so myself.

No matter how many positive attributes a name has going for it on paper, it only takes on the meaning you give it. That process for us starts now and we look forward to many a charming pun to come!