“Those Extra 7 Characters Have Felt Restrictive”

A company called SmartyStreets has rebranded itself as Smarty. Smartly, Smarty was able to acquire the brand match Smarty.com domain name in advance of the launch of its rebrand. Smarty announced the forthcoming rebrand in late 2021, and the company’s website now fully resolves at Smarty.com.

In a blog post announcing the rebrand, the company’s CTO shared one of the biggest reasons for why the company felt it was necessary to shorten its brand name:

“Many of our products already blurred the line between street and location data” said Jonathan Oliver, Founder and CTO of SmartyStreets adding “Those extra 7 characters have felt restrictive for a while now and where we’re going, we don’t need streets.”

This is a big reason for why many companies choose to rebrand to a shortened version of their brand name. They either pivot or expand their offering, and the limiting brand name they have doesn’t make sense for them any longer. Going with Smarty and getting the Smarty.com domain name was a strong business move.

Using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, I could not tell much about when the domain name was acquired by the company due to Whois privacy. The domain name transferred from TierraNet to Google’s domain registrar in 2020, but Whois privacy was enabled before and after. Around January of 2022, the domain name transferred to Namecheap. However, the domain name had been used by the company since late 2021.

Rebranding to Smarty and upgrading to the Smarty.com domain name was a smart decision. I have added Smarty to the Embrace.com list of companies that upgraded their domain name.

Thanks to Dommunity for sharing the news of this rebrand. Dommunity is a great account to follow to learn about companies that are or have rebranded.