Top 10 Companies That Changed Their Name

That original moniker almost sounds like the title of a Beatles song. In 1965, 17-year-old Fred DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from his friend Peter Buck to create a sandwich shop. The business was formally under a holding company called “Doctor’s Associates Incorporated.” It was called this because DeLuca hoped to make funds to finance medical school, while Buck already had a doctorate in Physics. Thus “Pete’s Super Submarines'' was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut! It was later renamed “Pete’s Subway” in 1966, and then “Subway” in 1968. The business soon became profitable as a franchise, with new shops opening up across Connecticut, and then across the country, after which it became a household name in sandwiches.

If you have been a long-time fan of wrestling, you know about this name change. After a fallout with the National Wrestling Alliance about the World Heavyweight Championship, Vincent J. McMahon and promoter Toots Mondt created the “World Wide Wrestling Federation” in the early ‘60s. It would later be renamed the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in 1979. But there was a problem. In the ‘80s, McMahon’s son, the infamous Vincent K. McMahon successfully took over his dad’s sports promotion company Capitol Wrestling Corporation, which was also the WWF’s sanctioning body. This resulted in the WWF eventually becoming such a household name that it came into contention with a nature NGO called the World Wildlife Fund in the 2000s. Following a lawsuit, the World Wrestling Federation became World Wrestling Entertainment.

If you want to gear up for the next basketball season, Nike shoes are undoubtedly on your radar. But their origins are more humble than you might think. In 1964, track athlete Phil Knight and his coach Bill Bowerman founded “Blue Ribbon Sports,” distributing Japanese shoes out of the back of the runner’s car. The “Blue Ribbon” was an obvious reference to the ribbons awarded after a competition. Once they started making their own shoes, the two wanted to compete with other big brands and renamed their business after the Greek Goddess of victory! They hired a designer to make the iconic swoosh, after which they started to climb to the Greek heights that their name implied.

Instagram wasn’t always the photo-sharing behemoth it is today, and its name change was a significant turn in the application’s direction. Before 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created Burbn, a social media application prototype that allowed users to “check into” select places and businesses, post their plans and share photos. It was all about shared, location-based experiences, most often around the niche of bars and alcohol. It didn’t perform as well as they had hoped and was deemed too like another app called Foursquare. So they kept tweaking things, taking what they had learned from Burbn, and conceived a photo-sharing app they called Instagram! With the name and focus change, they ultimately attracted millions in venture capital and the rest is, as they say, history!

Be it movies, televisions, or video games, Sony now has its hand in them somewhere. But this massive company had surprisingly humble beginnings. In 1946, Masura Ibuka, opened an electronics shop in Tokyo. Akio Morita joined him, and the two set up the company “Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō” or “Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation.” They built the country’s first tape recorder, and as they looked to expand, they brainstormed a name that they thought would work on the international stage. They considered TTK, Totsuko and Tokyo Teletech. Eventually, they settled on Sony as a mix of two words: “sonus” in Latin, meaning sound, and “sonny”, which was a loan phrase from English that is used in Japanese to refer to “smart and presentable young men.”

Since Facebook became a more increasing part of our everyday lives, the company has branched out into different areas. With the acquisition of Oculus, Instagram, Whatsapp, and more, it’s become more than just an organization running a social media website. One of the areas the company has been delving into is the “metaverse,” online virtual spaces, which is where many see the internet going next - including Facebook. But Facebook’s expansion o isn’t the only reason it changed the parent company’s name to Meta. Controversies surrounding privacy and data usage around the social networking service may have made the company consider rebranding to distance itself from trouble.

Everyone has sensitive details, and no one wants them to get into the wrong hands. So, in steps McAfee. The company was founded in 1987 and was bought over by Intel in 2011. Soon after, they renamed the company “Intel Security.” But why did they do this? Because its founder, John McAfee had long taken a step back from the company. He applauded the name change as he no longer wanted to be associated with the security software. But he was also a bit of a wildcard, with his notorious antics and crazy life continuing to make headlines. However, following a deal with TPG Capital in 2017, Intel Security formed a new independent company under McAfee, marking a return to the original name.

Sugary drinks have evolved over the years, but we bet you wouldn’t have guessed Pepsi was originally used as a treatment or relief medicine! In 1893, pharmacist Caleb Bradham invented a drink he simply named “Brad’s Drink.” He sold the product out of his drugstore, and it was advertised as something that relieved indigestion while not tasting terrible. Since that name didn’t roll off the tongue, it was renamed Pepsi-Cola in 1898. Why that name, you might ask? The “Pepsi” part referred to the condition “dyspepsia” (or indigestion), and “Cola” for its cola flavor! After it rose in popularity against rival that of Coca-Cola, it soon became the Pepsi we all know and love.

When Jeff Bezos built his online marketplace, the idea was that you could order books online and the item would arrive at your door “like magic”. So, from 1994-95, his company was named “Cadabra Inc.” in reference to the word “abracadabra.” However, his then-lawyer advised that it was “too obscure” and that it might be mistaken for “cadaver.” So Bezos started registering domain names: Awake.com, Browse.com, Bookmall.com, even Relentless.com! Eventually, Bezos turned to the dictionary, where he came across the name of the world’s largest river, which gave birth to the idea “Amazon”. Of course, Amazon doesn’t only sell books today and neither is it the only e-commerce company to go through fine tuning: auction site Ebay was once AuctionWeb.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

Aunt Jemima to Pearl Milling Company
Rebranded to “Make Progress Toward Racial Equality”

Tote’m Stores to 7-Eleven
Replaced to Mirror Their New Opening Hours

This one may seem almost comical, but “BackRub” was the name of the world’s premier search engine before they registered the Google.com domain in 1997 and incorporated Google the company the next year. It started as a research project at Stanford University in California, where Larry Page, Sergey Brin and unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan began exploring how web pages were linked to certain pages. Since the project heavily relied on “backlinks,” the project was nicknamed “BackRub.” The project operated on Stanford servers until it grew too big for them to handle, with Hassan leaving the project around this time as well. As they expanded, Page and Brin brainstormed different possible names. “Googolplex” was suggested by fellow Stanford student Sean Anderson, referencing the term for the number 1 followed by googol of zeros. Page shortened it to “Googol,” but a serendipitous typo during domain researching led to “Google.com”, which the founders ended up liking even more.