charles with a small "c"? An insight into our lowercase brand name.

We are proudly charles. But why do we insist on writing our name all lower case? It's not to be different, it's about staying out of way in WhatsApp conversations between brands and customers. 

We chose a real name name as a company name, so why do we write charles without a capital letter?

We get that this is unusual. Many people still write our name as "Charles."

I know the large emotions seemingly small grammatical things like this can bring up in people. Most of the time people don't even know it consciously, they just know something bothers them. At the same time, consistency in your brand name is important for trust.

It's like if your dentist was called Brian, but kept signing his emails "Bob." This is weird and confusing and makes you less likely to want let that person loose in your mouth.

We don't want to be Bob.

So, early on, we made the decision to be "charles" everywhere we appear (unless it's a sentence or headline entirely in capital letters, then it's CHARLES).

To help you understand why we made the decision to be charles and not Charles, here are the reasons we're proudly "charles."

1. charles is a WhatsApp catalyst

Most importantly: we are NOT the main event.

We're a go-between between brands and their customers. We're a WhatsApp software platform that hosts conversations and automation. We help brands building relationships with customers. We don't aim to take centerstage.

Our greatest ambition is to enable great things, not take credit for them.

We help our brands be the best they can be in WhatsApp, then stand back and let the magic happen. The small "c" is us staying humble and quiet in the background.

2. charles is not a person

It's tricky when you choose a real name for your brand. People start looking for a person behind the name. But we're not one. We're a company full of many people and personalities. 

This is also why we decided to call our brand character Typie. There were many internal requests to call it Charles or Charlie, but in reality, charles is a collection of beautiful, amazing, diverse people, not an individual. 

3. "King" is already taken

This is politically a hot potato which we don't want to slather butter onto. We're not affiliated with any kind of royalty. But we do appreciate him driving us some web traffic ;) 

4. We're not Charles anymore

Blast from the past: same lower case logo, but we used to use "Charles" as our brand name

We started out as the fashion brand, "Charles." When we pivoted to WhatsApp marketing software, we wanted to keep the name but separate ourselves at the same time. charles does both of those things.

5. Our logo is all lower case

The charles logo with Typie 

Some brands have a logo that's all lower case but write their name with a capital initial letter. We felt that was inconsistent and confusing.

If we did it like this, we would constantly get questions like, "Why is our logo small but in text we write it with a capital C? Isn't this confusing?"

Actually both ways cause confusion, but "always all lower case" is far easier to explain.

6. We're not cool

The hippest brands often write their names in capital letters at the moment (in Berlin anyway). We don't plan to be a hip brand. We're ok being the WhatsApp/conversational commerce nerds in the background.

We're busy making the best possible product, and offering the best possible support for our clients. 

Plus, we're here for the long-haul. Trends come and go, we intend to stay through many rounds of upper and lower case fashions.

Capital letters (like our customers) are cool. We're not. And that's ok.

7. If it's good enough for adidas...

Of course as a marketer, even though you try to do things differently, you also look for established references.

One small brand we heard of called adidas seems to do the same – writing its name in lower case both in its logo and within text. .

adidas is, like charles, all lower case, all the time, and they seem to be doing ok

We know charles may look strange at first 

We get it. We get occasional ire on Slack internally about this "typo." It's understandable. If you're used to certain grammar rules, it's difficult to change your mindset. 

But give it time

Once you break a grammar rule, and do it repeatedly, it's amazing how quickly you get used to it. For years, I wrote in UK English. Now I write entirely in US English. Every time I used to write a "personalize" or a "color" or put "quote marks outside punctuation," like that, I used to shiver. Now the UK versions "personalise" and "colour" seem weird to me. 

charles may take a little time to grow on you, but once it does, it'll make you happy. Promise. 

Want to speak to charles?

We like to spend more of our time talking about WhatsApp marketing than capital letters. Book a free 30-min call with us and find out more about our WhatsApp marketing platform, use cases for your businesses and a timeframe to get started.