Why rebrand? We simply decided to go Forrit! Guest post by Peter Proud, Founder and CEO of Forrit

Earlier this month, the technology company I co-founded in 2014 rebranded from Cortex Worldwide to Forrit.  Cortex was a legacy name for the business before we secured a management buyout from advertising giant WPP in 2017 and we just didn’t feel the name fitted the bill anymore.  From deciding we wanted to change our company identity to the rebrand launch itself took about two years.

So, what’s in a company’s name?  Where possible, I think it’s important to have something unique and it should be a name that you like.  In old (auld) Scots, “Forrit” means “forward” and that embraces the spirIt of our company as we are all about helping businesses move forward with their digital transformation.  One of my favourite sayings is that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good and we got lucky with Forrit.  In Ancient Greek, the word means “program” and in Icelandic it means “application”.  

A lot of people have asked why we we rebranded after six and a half years and fundamentally there are four reasons: there are lots of medical and tech companies with the same or similar names: we could not secure the trademark; we could not get the .com, and; last, but most importantly, Cortex just wasn’t representative of who we were anymore. 

On the day of our rebrand, we also announced board appointments which show how far we’ve come.  Steven “Guggs” Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of AI, Austen Mulinder, former CEO of Ziosk and a veteran of multiple startups, and Carolyn Jameson, Chief Legal and Policy officer at Trustpilot joined our board and their appointments illustrate the level of ambition we have for the business. 

The cloud-based web content management (WCM) platform we have spent years developing at significant cost, to the tune of almost £15 million, enables clients like Microsoft Education to create, deploy, analyse and optimise their digital estates.  In the case of Microsoft Education, our platform has supported a fivefold increase in traffic to their site since the onset of Covid-19 as online learning has become even more important.   As Liza Magee, Microsoft Education Director puts it: “The website infrastructure Forrit built, on Azure, supported our large traffic spikes, ensuring the user experience was never disrupted.”

As I said in a recent Pioneering People podcast with Morven McIntyre for The Scotsman, we saw the opportunity to create an application that sat on top of the Microsoft Azure service.  What we’ve developed since is a software service that customers use to build big secure scalable websites.  It is all about creating rich media experiences, deploying them across lots of different channels and analysing the output. 

Our new board appointees were kind enough to talk about how highly they rate our product and also to note how impressed they are with the team and culture at Forrit.  As we scale our business globally from a base in Edinburgh, our people, values and culture will remain central to everything we do and this approach has helped us get through such a challenging time during the current crisis.  

Youth and enthusiasm have been key components in our success to date and a couple of weeks ago we hired five more apprentices.  I always say that after starting the company, hiring graduates has been the second best thing I have done in business.  Around one in five of our team is now a graduate apprentice and we believe nurturing talent is key to both our own long-term success and that of Scotland’s tech sector as a whole. 

We are on an exciting journey at Forrit and are fortunate to have so many great people, from seasoned tech veterans to young people just out of high school, with us on the ride.

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 29th June 2020