Kennards Self Storage Brand Guidelines: Moorebank 1973, Orange Walls & a Family Owner

Storage garages behind a hire yard.

Kennards Self Storage grew out of a family equipment-hire business. English Wikipedia traces the family firm to 1948, when Walter Kennard founded W Kennard Agencies in Bathurst, in country New South Wales, selling equipment and machinery; renting out a concrete mixer instead of selling it pointed the way to a hire business, and the firm also became an agent for Caltex and for car makers including Hillman and Humber. The company moved to Sydney in 1951 and opened more branches across the city in the 1960s.

Self storage began in 1973. Wikipedia says six storage garages were built behind the family’s hire branch at Moorebank, in Sydney’s south-west, and calls it Australia’s first self-storage facility; the Sydney Morning Herald, in October 2004, wrote that Kennards Self Storage was formed in 1973 by Neville Kennard. The units were first branded Kennards Mini Storage and renamed Easi-Stor in 1979. In 1981, Wikipedia says, the business bought a disused wool store in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, and turned it into Queensland’s first self-storage centre, and nine more properties followed in Sydney, Newcastle and Brisbane during the 1980s.

In 1991 the two brothers who had taken over from their father divided the company. Andy Kennard kept the equipment-hire business, which still trades as Kennards Hire and had 146 branches in Australia and New Zealand by 2021, Wikipedia says, and Neville Kennard took the storage centres, which were renamed Kennards Self Storage. They have been separate companies ever since, with separate websites. Wikipedia says Neville’s son Sam Kennard became chief executive in 1994; the Herald named him as managing director in 2004 and as head of the “family-owned” company in 2018.

From 12 centres to more than 120.

Growth came in steps. Sam Kennard told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2004 that the company had gone from 12 to 29 facilities since 1995, and Wikipedia says the 1990s brought the first centre in Victoria. In the same interview he said 86 per cent of Australians had never used self storage, against about half of the population in the United States, and that Australia was perhaps five to ten years behind the American market. In the early 2000s Kennards opened the first of what Wikipedia counts as 20 wine-storage locations.

The big step was Millers Self Storage. In October 2004, the Herald reported, Kennards formed a 50-50 partnership with the listed Valad Property Group to buy Millers from Security Capital European Realty. The deal more than doubled Kennards’ locations to about 60, with more than 30,000 storage spaces, and the Herald said it would make Kennards the largest storage-centre operator in the country. The Millers sites were to be rebranded under the Kennards name, and Wikipedia says Kennards became the sole operator of Millers in 2008.

Kennards entered New Zealand in 2007 with a portfolio of North Island properties, realestatesource reported. In July 2025 it won a tender for National Mini Storage, an Auckland operator founded in Penrose in 1991, adding 13 centres; with that deal, the same report said, Kennards would run 126 locations, 24 of them in New Zealand and 16 in Auckland. Kennards said it planned to extend opening hours at the new sites, stock a wider range of boxes and moving supplies, and bring them into Business Class, its storage service for companies that need access across several locations.

In 2018 the Herald, citing IBISWorld, described Kennards as the biggest operator in the Australian sector by revenue share, at 12.7 per cent, among almost 700 operators. Its buildings vary widely: realestatesource noted that its extended Abbotsford centre in Melbourne was built into a former shoe factory.

How storage operators present themselves.

Self-storage is a property business that has to sell itself to people at a moment of change: a move, a renovation, a smaller home or a growing stock of inventory. The way operators present themselves follows from that. The building is the first advertisement, and cladding, roll-up doors and roadside signs can all carry a brand colour. Where a company publishes its building colours or signage system, this guide reports them as the company’s own description.

Online, the category has settled on a familiar set of tools. An operator’s website can lead with a store finder, a unit size guide that explains what fits in each space, a choice of unit types such as heated or drive-up storage, packing supplies and an account page for paying rent and booking. When one owner runs several regional brands, those sites can share a single template, with only the name, the city list and the colours changing, as StorageVault’s Access Storage and Sentinel Storage sites did in November 2026.

Campaigns and characters do the work the buildings cannot. Some operators use mascots, slogans or sports sponsorships to make a functional service memorable; StorageVault, for example, took stadium and broadcast signage with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2023, according to Inside Self Storage. When a guide mentions a mascot or campaign, it says where and when the company used it.

Behind the shop front sits a corporate layer. Some operators are listed companies or real estate investment trusts, or are owned by private-equity firms and family groups, and their investor pages explain store counts, rentable area, acquisitions and listings. Those figures are given here only as a dated source states them, and mergers or takeovers that have not closed are described as pending, with the date they were announced.

Orange and blue, at drive-by scale.

The look of Kennards is set by colour. Writing in ArchitectureAu in May 2015, David Welsh described the company’s “unashamed use” of orange, with a little blue, to brand its centres across the country, and said it had made its buildings instantly recognisable. He called it a large-scale, drive-by graphic technique: the company can occupy almost any building big enough for its needs, and the colours make it a Kennards building.

The same article reviewed the company’s new head office in Sydney, designed by SJB Interiors. It occupies an existing commercial and industrial building connected to one of the storage centres, and it brought marketing, accounts, finance and the call centre under one roof for the first time. Orange and blue livery greets visitors at the door and softens as they climb the new stairs; the fitout pairs a birch-plywood reception desk with a custom rug by Fiona Lynch, Vitra workstations by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Frank Gehry’s corrugated-cardboard Wiggle chairs in the waiting lounge, which Welsh thought the perfect piece for a self-storage company. Natural light enters through shaded glass walls and clerestory skylights, and a kitchen with a concrete bench sits at the centre of the plan as an informal meeting place. Welsh described Kennards as a second-generation family-owned business.

Wikipedia describes Kennards Self Storage as privately owned and counted 112 facilities in Australia and New Zealand in 2025, before the National Mini Storage centres were added.

For a design guide, Kennards Self Storage shows how one strong colour pair, carried on every building, can turn a mixed set of properties into one recognisable network; compare National Storage, its Brisbane rival, and Big Yellow in Britain. For this guide we use a bright orange, a deep blue and a warm white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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