Price, Waterhouse, Cooper and Lybrand.

PwC is the short form of a long name made from two older ones. The earlier, Price Waterhouse, began in 1849, when Samuel Lowell Price set up an accountancy practice at No. 5 Gresham Street in London, Wikipedia says. In 1865 Price went into partnership with William Hopkins Holyland and Edwin Waterhouse; Holyland left shortly afterwards, and from 1874 the firm was known as Price, Waterhouse & Co. It opened an office in New York in 1890, and as it spread to other cities and countries it set up a separate partnership in each, a federation that grew organically rather than through an international merger.

The second name began five years later. In 1854 William Cooper founded a practice at No. 13 George Street in London, and it became Cooper Brothers seven years later, when his three brothers joined. In the United States, Robert H. Montgomery, William M. Lybrand and the brothers Adam A. Ross Jr. and T. Edward Ross formed Lybrand, Ross Brothers and Montgomery in 1898. In 1957 Cooper Brothers, the American firm and the Canadian practice McDonald, Currie and Co. agreed to use the name Coopers & Lybrand for their international work, and in 1973 the British, American and Canadian firms adopted it at home too. In 1990, in some countries including the UK, Coopers & Lybrand merged with Deloitte Haskins & Sells and traded as Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte, reverting to Coopers & Lybrand in 1992.

The two families met in 1998, when Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand merged. The combined name was written as one word, PricewaterhouseCoopers, with a lower-case “w” and a capital “C” in the middle, Wikipedia notes. Inside the firm and outside it, people were soon shortening that to the initials PwC.

The network is overseen by PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, an English private company limited by guarantee that, according to Wikipedia, is responsible for managing the global brand, setting strategy and overseeing common standards. The member firms that use the name are separate legal entities, so the brand is held centrally while the practices themselves are local.

Wolff Olins, then a momentum mark.

The short name became official in September 2010. Accountancy Age reported on 16 September that the firm was abbreviating its name to PwC and that the new branding would go live on its websites around the world on Monday 20 September. The logo was simplified to the three initials, set in lower case as “pwc”. The paper noted that PricewaterhouseCoopers would remain the full name of the global organisation for legal purposes, and the name PwC firms would use to sign company audits.

The design came from the brand consultancy Wolff Olins, which, Accountancy Age reported, developed the logo with input from the firm’s clients, partners and employees, and designed it to be easier to use. Ian Powell, then chairman and senior partner of the UK firm, told the paper that the move brought the name into line with how clients and staff already referred to the firm; the initials had been used interchangeably with the long name since the 1998 merger.

The same day, the paper’s diary column took a lighter view. It joked that the new logo looked inspired by 1980s computer-game pixels, and pointed out that in the mark itself PwC was written “pwc”. Wolff Olins had worked on a PwC name before: in 2002, Wikipedia says, it created the brand Monday for the firm’s consulting business, which PwC sold to IBM later that year.

That 2010 identity lasted almost fifteen years. On 29 April 2025 PwC showed a new logo, which CPA Practice Advisor reported the next day had made its public debut alongside the announcement that PwC had become the official consulting partner of Formula 1. Citing Marketing Week, the magazine said the new look belonged to a global platform called “Catalyst for Momentum” and used a simplified logo with an orange “momentum mark”, an upward, forward design inspired by the “W” in PwC. Antonia Wade, PwC’s global chief marketing officer, told Marketing Week that the previous identity had looked dated beside some of the firm’s technology partners, and that its system had used a lot of colours.

Professional-services names and their marks.

Professional-services identities tend to be built from a short list of raw materials. The earliest is the partner’s surname: many advisory and accounting firms began as the name of one or two founders on a brass plate, and that surname often survives long after the founders have left, because clients and regulators already know it. When firms combine, the name usually grows by addition, with surnames joined by ampersands, and then shrinks again as the string becomes unwieldy. Initialisms are the common end point, turning a row of names into two, three or four letters that fit a business card, a building sign and a browser tab.

Mergers and separations also force renames. A firm that splits from a former parent, or that must stop using a name it no longer owns, sometimes coins a new word instead of reusing a surname, and that coined word then has to earn meaning through use. The visual side is usually restrained: a wordmark set in a sober serif or sans, one corporate colour used consistently, and a small graphic accent such as a dot, a bar or a typographic mark that stands in for a symbol. Redesigns in this field often adjust spacing, weight and colour rather than replacing the name, so continuity is part of the message.

A legal name and a trading name.

The legal name and the brand name now run side by side. PricewaterhouseCoopers remains the name of the global organisation for legal purposes, as Accountancy Age reported in 2010, while PwC is the name the firm trades under. The 2025 refresh kept the initials and changed the mark beside them. PwC says the new logo reflects how the firm already works, CPA Practice Advisor reported, and the magazine said it would be used across the PwC global network of firms.

Some of the name’s public visibility comes from roles outside accounting. Wikipedia says the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has used the firm’s services to tally the votes for the Academy Awards since 1935, and that the firm also oversees the Academy’s elections. That tie predates both the 1998 merger and the PwC name.

The consulting side has carried its own names. After selling Monday to IBM in 2002, PwC rebuilt its consulting practice through acquisitions, Wikipedia says, among them Diamond Management & Technology Consultants in 2010 and PRTM in 2011. In April 2014 Booz & Company combined with PwC to form Strategy&, a strategy consulting business that kept a name of its own. In 2018 Veritas Capital acquired PwC’s US public sector business and branded the new company Guidehouse.

Across all of this, the founders’ surnames have been compressed rather than dropped. Price, Waterhouse, Cooper and Lybrand became PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1998, the initials PwC in 2010 and, in the logo since 2025, three letters beside an orange mark drawn from one of them.

For a design guide, PwC shows how a long merged name can be shortened to the initials people already used. Compare Deloitte, which kept its founder’s surname whole and added a green dot, and Financial Times, another London name long read by the business world. For this guide we use orange, burnt orange, rose and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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