Ichikara Inc. renamed itself ANYCOLOR ahead of a public listing

The setup

In May 2021, the company operating the Nijisanji VTuber project changed its registered name from Ichikara Inc. to ANYCOLOR Inc., ahead of a later public stock listing. The company's own rebranding announcement, archived by the Internet Archive on 17 May 2021, states directly that Ichikara Inc. had changed its company name to ANYCOLOR Inc., and frames the change as timed to the company's move into its fifth year since a May 2017 founding.

What the documents show

The announcement is unusually detailed for a corporate rename notice: it walks through the stated background for the rebrand, the meaning intended by the new name, the process used to choose it — internal workshops, an employee and partner-company naming competition of nearly 100 submissions, then a survey of staff and affiliated talents — and a related headquarters move completed the previous month. It explicitly thanks the public for their recognition of the company's former name, Ichikara, which is the company's own naming of its prior identity, not a name this entry supplies. The company's current about page, retrieved 16 September 2026, confirms the same 2017 founding date and present name but no longer walks through the intermediate rebrand in this much detail, a normal simplification for an evergreen corporate page rather than a contradiction.

The craft

The announcement documents a rebrand process built on internal input — workshops, an open naming call, and staff and talent surveys — rather than a decision made solely by executives or an outside branding firm. For a creator watching how an agency they work with might handle a similar structural change, that process detail is the most concrete, verifiable part of the announcement, separate from the marketing language around the new name's meaning.

Keeping the creator in control

The announcement states that affiliated talents were surveyed as part of choosing the new name, alongside staff, which this entry reads as evidence that the rebrand process included talent input at some stage, without overstating how much weight that input carried in the final decision. That distinction — included versus decisive — is an editorial reading of the announcement's own wording.

• When your agency or platform rebrands, what evidence would tell you whether talent had real input versus token consultation?
• How does a company's own current about page differ from its original, contemporaneous announcement of the same event?
• What should a rename change about how you cite a company's history in your own records?

Ichikara's own May 2021 announcement is the clearest documented account of why and how it became ANYCOLOR, and its own wording, naming Ichikara and not any other prior identity, is the detail worth anchoring to when the company's history gets summarized elsewhere.