Ares Management Brand Guidelines: The Los Angeles Credit Manager Founded in 1997

Five credit specialists, Los Angeles, 1997.

Ares Management was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Los Angeles, according to the IPO profile kept by Renaissance Capital and a company profile published by InvestmentNews. Its founders were Antony Ressler, Michael Arougheti, David Kaplan, John H. Kissick and Bennett Rosenthal, InvestmentNews says, describing them as senior credit and leveraged-finance professionals who built the early firm around credit underwriting.

Credit came first. Ares says it was set up to pursue opportunities in bank loans, high-yield bonds, direct lending and other forms of credit and structured equity. In 2004 its business development company, Ares Capital Corporation, completed an IPO and began trading on Nasdaq, the company says; English Wikipedia describes it as a provider of financing for middle-market acquisitions, recapitalisations and leveraged buyouts, mainly in the United States. Ares says its credit group expanded into Europe in 2007, while English Wikipedia dates its London-based arm, Ares Management Limited, to 2006.

In May 2007 the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority bought a minority interest in the firm without voting or governance rights, English Wikipedia says. In 2012 Ares launched its first publicly traded funds, a credit fund on the New York Stock Exchange and a commercial real estate company on Nasdaq, according to the company.

The firm itself went public in May 2014, when Ares Management, L.P. listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ARES; Renaissance Capital records the IPO date as 1 May 2014 and puts the firm’s staff at about 700 at the time. It was then a partnership. On 26 November 2018 it completed a conversion to a Delaware corporation and was renamed Ares Management Corporation, the trade publication ABF Journal reported that day, having already elected to be taxed as a corporation from March 2018. Ares’s own timeline places the move to a corporate structure in 2019, alongside the launch of its insurance business, Aspida Financial.

From one credit shop to five businesses.

Ares now groups its work into five businesses — credit, real estate, infrastructure, private equity and secondaries — alongside a private wealth arm, according to its website. Growth came partly through acquisitions. In 2020 it bought SSG Capital, a Hong Kong–based alternative investment firm that now operates as Ares SSG and extended Ares across the Asia-Pacific region; English Wikipedia dates completion of that deal to July 2020.

In 2021 it acquired Landmark Partners, a secondaries manager, and the US real estate investment advisory business of Black Creek Group, launching its secondaries and wealth-management platforms, the company and InvestmentNews both say. InvestmentNews adds that Ares took a minority stake in BlueCove, a London-based systematic fixed-income manager, in 2023. In 2025 Ares completed its purchase of GCP International, the international business of GLP Capital Partners; the company describes the deal as making Ares a top-three global owner and operator of logistics assets.

Its standing as a listed company grew too. InvestmentNews reports that Ares joined the S&P 500 index in December 2025. Michael Arougheti, a co-founder, is chief executive, and the company says it has more than sixty offices worldwide.

The 2012 launches gave the name its first fund tickers: the Ares Dynamic Credit Allocation Fund on the New York Stock Exchange and Ares Commercial Real Estate Corporation on Nasdaq, the company says. Ares Capital Corporation remains a separately listed business development company advised by an Ares subsidiary, Ares Capital Management, which English Wikipedia describes as an SEC-registered investment adviser. Ares SSG, English Wikipedia adds, makes credit, private equity and special-situations investments across the Asia-Pacific region. As of 30 September 2026 the company gave its headcount as about 4,600 employees and said it had around 2,950 direct institutional relationships.

How private equity presents itself.

Private equity firms sell nothing that sits on a shelf, so their identities have to work without a product. The usual answer is restraint: a short wordmark, often initials or a surname set in a plain sans or a quiet serif, with one dark colour and a lot of white space. The name does most of the work, and the mark is meant to sit comfortably beside the logos of pension funds, banks and the companies a firm owns.

The physical setting carries the same message. Headquarters tend to be in glass-walled towers in financial districts, and the photography on firm websites leans on offices, skylines and people in meetings rather than on objects. When a firm wants to show what it does, it usually shows its portfolio companies: a factory floor, a data centre, a hospital corridor or a shop, each credited to the business rather than to the investor.

Much of the visible design lives in documents. Annual letters to investors, responsible-investment and sustainability reports, investor-day presentations and quarterly results decks are where the typography, charts and colour systems are most fully worked out. Listed firms add the formal layer of a public company, from stock-exchange filings to shareholder reports, and the same restrained palette usually runs through all of them.

Beyond the page, these firms present themselves through institutions. Founders and partners appear as donors to museums, concert halls and universities, and firm names turn up on fellowships, research centres and sponsorships. For a design reader, the category is a study in how far a brand can be carried by a name, a typeface and a tone of voice alone.

A one-word name and five values.

The identity is compact. The firm signs itself simply as Ares, and its web addresses have moved to match: in November 2026 the investor-relations site at the older aresmgmt.com address redirected to ares.com. The company’s story page leads with relationships, quoting Arougheti on investing in them “over decades — not months, not years.” It presents its history as a row of dated milestones, from the 1997 founding to the 2025 GCP International purchase. Visitors to ares.com are first asked to choose a country and a role, such as institutional investor, so that the site can tailor what it shows them.

Ares names five values: collaborative, responsible, entrepreneurial, self-aware and trustworthy. The name also runs through a family of separately listed vehicles, including Ares Capital Corporation, Ares Commercial Real Estate Corporation and the Ares Dynamic Credit Allocation Fund, and through regional arms such as Ares SSG. Its website carries a cybersecurity and fraud-awareness page, and its insights section runs named series such as “In Teamwork We Trust” and “The New Economy” alongside press releases.

For a design guide, Ares shows how a single short name can stretch across a listed parent, listed funds and regional businesses, with the corporate story told as a timeline. Compare it with Carlyle, another listed alternative-asset manager, and Morgan Stanley, a New York financial house. For this guide we use graphite, stone and copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ares Management’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.