⊹ the circe brief ⊹
At basically every event, someone asks where the name “Circe” came from. The rate has gone way up since Nolan’s Odyssey came out in July and half of SF sat in a theater watching Samantha Morton turn a room full of soldiers into pigs with her hands.
So, is that who we’re named after? Yes. And to explain, we have to tell you about The Kitchen first.
the kitchen era
When we were brainstorming names, we knew what we didn’t want first. Every name we brainstormed early on sounded like a nonprofit panel from 2016: Empower, Elevate, Rise, Ignite, Her-something. We’re not an empowerment organization. Nobody in this community needs empowering. Circe is full of women who already run companies, write checks, and ship products. A name that promises to empower them is talking down to them.
Our favorite for a long time was The Kitchen.
We were obsessed. The kitchen is where the actual work happens, where people are heads-down and grinding, where the good conversations happen at parties. Obviously it was a tongue-in-cheek wink at “women belong in the kitchen”. Damn right they do; but only because the kitchen is badass.
We had the merch designed in our heads before we had anything else: LET HER COOK across the back of a crewneck, SHE’S COOKING on a tote.
Then we started testing it with our champions and the reactions were not as expected. Women who’d grown up in cultures or generations where that stereotype wasn’t a joke, did not find it cute. Some were straight-up offended. They weren’t excited to wear it, and they didn’t trust that a stranger seeing the name on a shirt would get the wink.
That killed it for us. We’re building rooms where people feel like insiders. A name that requires you to already be in on the joke does the opposite.
the arial test
Here’s what we learned: if your name needs a slogan, a color palette, a custom typeface, and a paragraph of explanation to land correctly, the name is working against you.
Write it in Arial, black ink, white page, no logo, no context. Does it still feel like you? The Kitchen in Arial reads like a restaurant group in Nashville. Everything that made it ours was bolted on from the outside. So in true startup fashion... we pivoted.
a masterclass in naming a company: skims
The irony is that Skims only exists because Kim Kardashian had to bury a name too. She launched the line as Kimono in June 2019, the mayor of Kyoto wrote her an open letter asking her to drop the trademark, and she renamed the whole thing that August, weeks before launch. Talk about pivoting!
And what she landed on is one of the best brand names of the last decade, because it does about five jobs at once.
It’s skin, which is what the product feels like.
It’s skimming, which is what it does to your silhouette.
It gets you within a letter of skinny without ever saying it.
It carries the K, which is the family’s whole visual signature.
Has “Kim” in the name
And then the rest of the brand keeps agreeing with the name. The logo is round. Walk into a store and good luck finding a sharp edge in the room.
The name is a multiplier for the brand.
So that’s the bar we set for ourselves (a $5B brand is not a low bar). We wanted a name that would keep giving us material for years instead of one we’d have to keep propping up.
ok, so spill the tea: why circe
She’s a goddess of transformation and a certified alchemist. She’s the first witch in all of Western literature, and she’s the daughter of the sun.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe, like most women in the poem, is a side character. She gets one book out of twenty-four. Odysseus stays on her island for a year and it’s a few pages. She turns his men into pigs, he pulls a sword, she drops to her knees, and Homer moves on. No reason given for why she did it, and Odysseus never asks.
Madeline Miller offers a more 360 view of Circe in her novel, Circe.
Her Circe is a goddess born into a family that finds her embarrassing: wrong voice, no lightning, nothing the other gods respect. Then she discovers a different kind of power in the plants that she learns by hand over years of trial and error. Eventually, she is exiled to an island for it.
But she doesn’t beg to come back. She learns every plant on that island. She takes in the nymphs other gods send her as punishment, harbors a fugitive craftsman, goes toe to toe with Athena, and raises a son alone. The island stops being an exile and becomes a home she built by hand. And the men who show up wanting to take something from her? Well. You saw the movie…
That was the version we fell for. Strong and powerful, but also soft, empathetic, human in a way the gods around her aren’t. And she’s one of the only women in all of mythology who gets to be powerful, live on her own terms, scare the gods, and not get punished for it.
A woman who didn’t fit the room she was born into, so she built her own. Greek mythology’s first founder, basically.
And she passed the test. This newsletter is a spell book. Our whole visual world (the alchemy symbols, the Renaissance paintings, the Transamerica Pyramid sitting on a semiconductor) came out of the name instead of getting stapled onto it. Every time we need something new, we go back to her and there’s more there.
(The part we didn’t clock until later: we started at a kitchen and ended up with a woman whose entire magic is based on cooking.)
okay, but… the pigs
Fair. Morton’s version of that scene is the best thing in the movie, and it’s a lot.
But listen to what she says when Odysseus confronts her: “I didn’t turn your men into anything. This is who they are.” He asks if his men hurt her. No, she says. But they would have. And the movie proves her point: it cuts back to Troy, and to what these same men did to the women there.
Then, when she turns them back: “back into your disguises.” The pig was never the curse. The pig was the honest version. The man was the costume.
And the part the movie left out: when Odysseus finally leaves, she’s the one who tells him how to get home. The Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, which one to steer at, the cattle he must not touch. She doesn’t have to. She does it anyway.
So no, she’s not a crazy woman in a hut. She’s a powerful woman who built a space of her own, on her own terms, and from that space could see people clearly, tell them the truth, and help them anyway.
That’s the Circe we named ourselves after. And it’s the room we’re building with you.
-Isa and Anna ⊹
upcoming events
sept 10 | gtm after dark | RSVP
⊹
oct 5 | lucy guo tech week masquerave | RSVP
⊹
new circe merch
We have some news: Circe has merch! if you're interested in rocking the Circe brand, check out our shop here. Yearly subscribers to the Circe platform get a free “Claude is a Woman” sweatshirt, in case you needed a little extra incentive to join us :)
That’s all from us this week! We’re so happy to have you follow long in our journey, and if you want to officially be part of our community, you can apply here.
