Oppenheimer 60th Anniversary - 20

Reprinting of From Opportunity to
Legacy: Celebrating the First Fifty Years

Modified From Opportunity to Legacy:
Celebrating the First Fifty Years

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The Origin of the
Four-Hands Logo
1965

The OppenheimerFunds logo - a
depiction of four hands, each grasping a wrist to
form a solid square - captures the dependability
and cooperation that define the Company's approach to investing and customer service.
The symbol dates to 1752, when Benjamin Franklin displayed it on homes covered by his pioneering
fire insurance company. Oppenheimer Management
Corp. adopted the symbol in 1965. At that time the
Company's board included Benjamin Lipstein, a market research whiz with the advertising firm of SSC&B.
At his suggestion, SSC&B conducted research to
identify qualities customers look for in a mutual
fund, in order to develop a symbol. The qualities
identified were strength, unity, a strong organization,
singleness of purpose, and familiarity.

It would become one
of the most recognized
symbols in the financial
services industry.
Leon Levy and Don Spiro went to SSC&B's office
to review the images the agency had come up with.
"They had maybe a hundred symbols," remembered
Spiro. "We went through a process of elimination
and came down to three: one was a lighthouse, another a gold key, and another was the four hands."
Levy and Spiro chose the four-hands design for
its graphic depiction of strength, teamwork, and
security. Spiro then vetted the symbol with all the
Company's partners. Little did they know that
over the next 40-plus years it would become one
of the most recognized symbols in the financial
services industry.
While it has undergone some minor stylistic
modifications over the years, the four-hands logo
has been left largely unchanged since its adoption.
Depicting a sturdy method for two rescuers to
transport an injured person, it is still the symbol of
the strength and teamwork OppenheimerFunds
brings to bear in working for its customers. n

20 * OppenheimerFunds: The First Fifty Years

Whose Hands
Are Those?
According to legend, Harvey Feinstein
was working as an assistant to the president of Saks Fifth Avenue when a friend
asked him to be an impromptu hand
model. As instructed, he showed up at
the photo shoot with a tweed jacket and
a blue blazer. He put one arm through
a jacket sleeve and the other through a
blazer sleeve, and grasped wrists with the other model, also wearing two different sleeves. For many years, the resulting image was the Company's logo.
By looking at the image, how can we tell this isn't quite what happened? n

FOCUS ON PERFORMANCE
Throughout this time the Firm thrived. Of course, by
1960 the Oppenheimer Fund had been successfully
launched. In the same year, Oppenheimer Management Corporation was established as the Fund's
investment advisor, the predecessor to OppenheimerFunds, Inc., which also became the Fund's
distributor in 1965. Still, while the Fund offering
was certainly an accomplishment, there were no
guarantees that it would succeed, let alone flourish.
From very early on, the Firm's leaders understood that the Oppenheimer Fund would have to
find some way to stand out from its competitors.
The way to do this, they decided, was to focus on
one of the most important factors to shareholders:
performance. It was an early indication of the sort
of shareholder-focused culture that is now such a
hallmark of OppenheimerFunds. Despite the fact
that the early 1960s was a challenging time for the

markets - in 1962, for example, the Oppenheimer
Fund saw its assets plummet from $17 million to
$13 million in a few short months in a recession that
followed Blue Monday - the Fund's investment
managers were so successful that over its initial 10
years, wrote early partner Leon Levy, "it had the best
performance record of any mutual fund in the country, according to The New York Times."
But a focus on investment performance, while
essential, was not necessarily enough to drive
sales. "The Fund was put together by a group of
securities analysts," recalled Chairman Emeritus Don Spiro. "It didn't have any sales appeal
because nobody could understand it."
Some characteristics of the Oppenheimer Fund
that had been designed to drive performance may
have actually hurt sales initially. For example, characteristics such as the freedom to sell short, invest
anywhere in the free world, and invest more than

The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by U.S.-backed
anti-Castro exiles ends in failure after just two days.

Four-hands logo adopted as the symbol of Oppenheimer
Management Corp.

1961

1965

Oppenheimer 60th Anniversary

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