T. Rowe Price Brand Guidelines: Baltimore’s 1937 Growth-Stock Firm and Its Bighorn Sheep

A Baltimore broker’s idea of a different kind of firm.

The firm carries its founder’s name. Thomas Rowe Price Jr. founded T. Rowe Price & Associates in Baltimore in 1937, English Wikipedia says, after starting out in the 1920s as a researcher and account manager at Baltimore-area brokerages. Its first office was on Light Street, and many of its first associates had left MacKubin, Legg and Co., a forerunner of Legg Mason, together with Price.

Wikipedia describes three ways in which the new firm departed from the sales-driven brokerages of the day: it charged fees based on the assets it managed rather than on sales volume, it ran clients’ accounts strictly as a fiduciary, and it invested in growth stocks rather than value stocks. Price became known as the “father of growth investing,” it adds, and Forbes nicknamed him the “Sage of Baltimore.”

The early years were difficult. English Wikipedia says the small firm, which managed private accounts for Baltimore-area families, struggled through the Great Depression and the Second World War before finding firmer footing at the end of the 1940s. By 1950 there were too many clients for the staff to manage each account by hand, so the firm incorporated and launched its first mutual fund, the T. Rowe Price Growth Stock Fund.

Price stepped back gradually. He resigned as president in 1963 and sold his shares, Wikipedia says, but stayed active for several years and pressed for a new fund aimed at the inflation he expected in the 1970s. He retired completely in 1971. The company still carries his name, and its website says it has been working for clients “since 1937.”

Funds, offices and a stock-market listing.

The fund range grew from the Growth Stock Fund outward. English Wikipedia dates the New Horizons Fund, which looked for growth companies including technology firms, to 1960, and the New Era Fund to 1969. A Fixed Income Division followed in 1971. In 1962 the firm moved its headquarters to the new One Charles Center in downtown Baltimore, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and later moved to East Pratt Street.

International work began with a partner. In 1979 T. Rowe Price formed a joint venture with the British asset manager Robert Fleming & Co., named Rowe Price-Fleming International. The company went public in 1986 and has been listed on Nasdaq under the ticker TROW since then, according to Wikipedia; a Hong Kong office followed in 1987. In 1999 it bought full ownership of the London-based venture, which was renamed T. Rowe Price International, and joined the S&P 500 index the same year.

Retirement became a central line of business. Wikipedia says retirement plan services were launched in the 1990s, that a Luxembourg fund range for investors outside the United States, T. Rowe Price Funds SICAV, followed in 2001, and that the firm created target-date retirement funds two years later. In 2010 it took a significant stake in UTI, which Wikipedia calls India’s oldest mutual fund company. The company’s website says it has pioneered solutions in retirement and target-date investing and active ETFs, and works with clients in more than 50 countries; those are its own descriptions.

It has also added a credit business. Oak Hill Advisors, the New York credit manager known as OHA, says on its website that it is a subsidiary of T. Rowe Price.

How asset managers present themselves.

Asset managers sell something that cannot be photographed: a promise about money over decades. Their visual language tends to borrow calm from elsewhere. Campaigns favour quiet photography of savers, families and retirees, while corporate pages lean on skyline offices, glass lobbies and the street names of financial districts. The tone is reassurance rather than excitement.

Much of the real design work sits in documents. Fund factsheets, prospectuses and annual reports follow tight templates in which a fund name, a ticker and a chart must sit in the same place on every page, across dozens of languages and jurisdictions. Exchange-traded funds have added their own graphic shorthand: three- and four-letter tickers that work almost as logos, and fund-family names such as SPDR, launched by State Street in 1993, and iShares, which BlackRock acquired with Barclays Global Investors in 2009.

The larger firms also publish a steady stream of thought leadership. Stewardship reports explain how they vote shares on behalf of clients, sustainability reports set out policies, and annual letters from chief executives and market-outlook publications are written to be quoted by the financial press. These pieces are designed as editorial products, with covers, charts and data graphics, and they carry much of a firm’s identity.

Visibility beyond the financial pages usually comes through sponsorship of sports and the arts, and occasionally through public stunts: State Street’s Fearless Girl statue, installed facing Wall Street’s Charging Bull in March 2017, began as a promotion for an index fund. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — its founding, its owners and its deals — and keeps colours and typefaces to an unofficial interpretation.

A bighorn sheep named Trusty.

The firm’s symbol is an animal. English Wikipedia says the corporate logo since 1983 has been a bighorn sheep, known inside the firm as Trusty, and quotes the company explaining that the animal’s sure-footed agility, sharp vision and ability to cross difficult terrain reflect its mission. In June 2024 the company’s head of global marketing, Theresa McLaughlin, told MLB.com that the sheep had “been around for a long time” and stood for agility, moving forward and climbing hills.

That remark came with a sponsorship which McLaughlin told Marketing Brew went beyond anything the company had done in sports marketing. On 10 June 2024 the Baltimore Orioles announced T. Rowe Price as the team’s first-ever jersey patch sponsor, Marketing Brew reported that day; the patch, with the company name and Trusty, appeared on the sleeves from the next night’s game against the Atlanta Braves at Camden Yards. English Wikipedia describes it as a circular patch in dark blue, aqua and white. She also said the company had been working on a brand refresh for about a year and that the sponsorship was the next step; the deal followed a smaller one with the Atlantic Coast Conference. MLB.com said the multiyear partnership also brought a brand presence at the Orioles’ spring training base in Sarasota, Florida.

The company stays in Baltimore. English Wikipedia says that in March 2025 it moved its headquarters from East Pratt Street to a new global headquarters in the city. In September 2025, InvestmentNews reported, Goldman Sachs and T. Rowe Price announced a strategic collaboration under which Goldman planned to buy up to 3.5% of T. Rowe Price’s shares on the open market, and the two firms said they intended to launch co-branded target-date strategies combining public and private markets in mid-2026. The sources used for this guide do not confirm whether those strategies had launched.

For a design guide, T. Rowe Price shows how a single animal symbol can carry a financial brand from fund reports to a baseball sleeve. Compare Fidelity, another American fund house, and Goldman Sachs, its 2025 collaborator. For this guide we use a harbor navy, a teal and a limestone tone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep T. Rowe Price’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.