Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Rebrands as Simply “HMH”

After years of being referred to by its nickname, HMH, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is making it official.

The enormous writer and educational assets supplier has introduced it’s going to rebrand as merely HMH, dropping the complete Houghton, Mifflin, and Harcourt.

The rebrand, which features a new emblem and visible look, is a part of HMH’s efforts to replicate modifications the corporate has made in recent times, which incorporates broadening its product traces from a heavy concentrate on core curriculum supplies to providing evaluation instruments and an array of supplemental assets, CEO Jack Lynch informed EdWeek Market Transient.

“What we wished greater than anything was a model that basically displays who we’re and the place we’re going as an schooling firm,” he stated.

Since being taken personal by personal fairness agency Veritas Capital for $2.8 billion in 2022, HMH has made a variety of acquisitions to increase its choices, together with shopping for evaluation supplier NWEA and AI-powered writing assistant Writable.

Lynch famous that the Boston-based firm has sought to make use of machine studying, generative AI, and studying science to present lecturers real-time advice and save them time. It employs studying expertise designers, researchers, and software program engineers.

“Our DNA is basically totally different as an organization than we have been seven years in the past, a lot much less 190 years in the past once we have been fashioned,” the CEO stated.

The choice to shorten the corporate’s identify to only its initials follows within the footsteps of different giant corporations, typically ones with lengthy histories that wish to increase their model identification, geography, and enterprise choices, corresponding to IBM, AT&T, and TD Financial institution.

HMH has already been utilizing the HMH and the complete Houghton Mifflin Harcourt names interchangeably in recent times. Adopting HMH because the official model identify is a technique to level to its future.

“It’s actually targeted on what we do right now and the route of the corporate versus a nod to the previous as a commerce writer and academic writer,” he stated.

The identify Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was fashioned via a collection of acquisitions and partnerships that dates again to the early nineteenth century.

In keeping with a timeline of HMH’s historical past on its web site, the corporate’s origins are rooted in a Boston publishing agency based in 1832 referred to as Ticknor & Fields, the place “the main lights of nineteenth century literature discovered a house.”

A successor to Ticknor & Fields was acquired by a printing firm based by Henry Oscar Houghton. The names Houghton Mifflin got here collectively in 1880 when publishing govt George Mifflin turned a companion.

Harcourt got here into the image in 1919, the web site states, when Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace based a publishing firm in New York, that finally turned a part of the group.

At the moment, the corporate estimates that it serves 50 million college students throughout 150 nations. It says that 90 p.c of college programs within the U.S. use some type of of its core, intervention, and supplemental packages.

The corporate has lengthy been a significant participant in offering curriculum to particular person districts, and in successful approval via state curriculum adoption processes.