How we got from Mzizzi to Anzili

Thought process…

What if I told you, you had to change your name in 3 months. Your government registered name – that one your parent(s) gave your at birth. Where would you start, how would you explain it to your family, neighbors, the government, your employer, even your dog? How did you come up with the name? Why that name? What if people didn’t like it? So many questions, so little answers. As if that wasn’t enough, you watched the movie – face off, and decided you also wanted a new face (insert really shocked emoji here)?

As you can see, changing your name is amazingly difficult, tedious and nerve-wracking, changing your face – now that’s just for the movies, or is it?

Welcome to the amazingly difficult, tedious and nerve-wracking task of rebranding from Mzizzi to Anzili. We won’t bore you with just how many times we argued over what a good name sounds like or how much time we spent looking out of the windows for inspiration. The sulking from our imaginary parents after we told them what we were thinking. Let’s just get to the crux of the matter.

The changing…

Anzili Origin Story

We have worked on many projects together, but we have always wanted to do a thing that helps lots of people. We loved the different projects that we worked on together and separately; for governments and private businesses; for founders and established brands but we always wanted to build something that could help others grow.

As James was building a platform for selling fruits and honey; he loves the tasty things, he discovered how hard it was to build an online business. So, we got together to make all the necessary bits to make it work and, in the process, we realized that what we were building could help millions of other businesses.

If we made the tools that we had built available to every business across Africa, not only could we help entrepreneurs build great businesses, but also give them the capacity to help others too. This is how Anzili was born.

Why the change from Mzizzi To Anzili?

We’re launching a new name and logo, as we start to refresh our look in across all our platforms and channels. We loved our old name & logo, and look, and know many felt the same. And yet, here we are to explain why we decided to evolve it.

• How would you feel if people kept getting the spelling or pronunciation of your name wrong? See, our former name was MZIZZI, we loved this name. We dreamt about what a lovely name it was, sometimes our colleagues would overdo it and name their kids Mzizzi, oh, what wonderful times.
• Then we realized something, our friends, our customers, the media guys, and just about anyone misspelt or mispronounced it. Sometimes it was Mizizi, Mzizi, Muzizi (why now). It was too much. If we had a second name like Stephen, maybe we’d have told everyone to use that instead.
• Mzizzi meant a lot to us, it was a play on the Swahili word for Taproot. We were building a platform that was central to the success of many businesses.
• Now the name wasn’t being spelt right, there were other businesses and brands with a variation of our name, how would people recognize us. May the real Mzizzi please stand up.
• Oh, another thing, our logo had the shopping basket icon which represented our ecommerce offering, now we are more than this.
• Our brands also didn’t have a sense of cohesion, we had Paytree for payments, Mzizzi for eCommerce and it just didn’t feel like they were related. Moving forward we are merging both of them into one brand.

Our Logo

Anzili Logo

We are proud to announce the launch of the new company logo as part of the ongoing evolution of our company’s brand.

Our business has grown and evolved over the years, and we felt it was time for a change. We have refreshed our logo to reflect who we are today and to symbolise our future. After careful consideration, we chose a new logo that reflects a more modern look and captures our mission to deliver excellent quality, performance and service support across the products we provide.

Our Brandmark

The alpha “A” brandmark in our logo which is also the first letter of the Greek alphabet symbolizes a beginning it also means leader in Hebrew. For us alpha symbolizes how we feel about helping you start a new business or a new way of doing business, a fresh beginning. It also stands for our leadership in what we do.