Mobile Mini Brand Guidelines: Phoenix Containers, 1983, Folded Into WillScot in 2024

A container seller that started building its own.

Mobile Mini began in Phoenix, Arizona, in June 1983. English Wikipedia says it was founded by Richard Bunger under the name Mobile Mini Storage Systems, and that it started out selling storage containers to construction companies and manufacturers. Its product was simple to describe and hard to dress up: a welded steel box that could be dropped on a site, locked and used for tools, stock or an office.

Growth came first within the American Southwest. English Wikipedia says that by 1986 the company had moved into markets outside Phoenix, and that a shortage of cargo containers pushed it to start manufacturing its own containers in Phoenix. In the early 1990s it developed a patented “bi-cam” locking system, later followed by a “Tri-Cam” version, and its larger plants also built modular classrooms for Arizona and New Mexico. Acquisitions in 1998 added Las Vegas and Oklahoma City, English Wikipedia says, alongside growth in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.

The company kept adding fleets. In 2008, English Wikipedia says, Mobile Mini merged with The Mobile Storage Group, giving it a combined storage and office rental fleet of more than 274,000 units. In November 2014 it bought Evergreen Tank Solutions, a business renting tanks, pumps and filtration equipment, and in 2015 it sold about 9,400 wooden mobile offices to Acton Mobile so that it could concentrate on steel storage and containment, English Wikipedia says. By then, on English Wikipedia’s account, the business rented portable storage, ground-level offices, tanks, pumps and filtration equipment, and ran locations in the United States, Canada and the UK.

One name, several divisions, then a sale.

For a design reader, the most useful step came in February 2017. English Wikipedia says the company then brought all of its divisions under the Mobile Mini name: the storage and ground-level office business became Mobile Mini Storage Solutions, the former Evergreen Tank and Water Movers businesses became Mobile Mini Tank + Pump Solutions, and the umbrella brand became Mobile Mini Solutions. The same year brought Mobile Mini Connect, an online portal where customers could see account details, manage invoices and request collections.

Mobile Mini also had a British business. In December 2022 The Construction Index reported that Modulaire Group, the parent of the modular-building company Algeco, was acquiring Mobile Mini UK Holdings from Mobile Mini Incorporated of the United States. The UK company was headquartered in Stockton-on-Tees, ran a network of 16 locations and had a fleet of more than 42,000 units — steel storage containers, portable offices and toilets — serving construction, retail, manufacturing, health and education customers. Together, the paper said, the two businesses would have about 82,000 units, which it was claimed would be the largest temporary accommodation hire fleet in the UK.

Construction Enquirer reported the same deal on 14 December 2022, adding that Mobile Mini UK had 375 employees and that Algeco had formerly been known as Elliott Group. In September 2023 the same title reported that Algeco, having acquired Mobile Mini earlier that year, was bringing the UK operation into a single business under the main Algeco brand. The old UK web address now forwards to Algeco’s own site.

Cabins, containers and fleets.

Modular and portable-building firms sell something people mostly see from the roadside: a cabin at the edge of a building site, a stack of steel modules beside a school, a row of storage containers in a depot yard. Their websites lean on that picture. Product pages show single units and stacked blocks photographed outside and in, often with the furniture and fittings that turn a box into an office or a classroom, and case studies show finished complexes from the air.

The units themselves carry much of the identity. A company name on the side of a cabin is seen by everyone who passes a site, and colour can become a signature: Algeco says the dark grey finish it introduced with its Progress range in 2005 is now emblematic of the market. Some names have become so familiar that the companies ask for them not to be used as generic words; Algeco’s French website has a page making exactly that request.

Much of the selling now happens online. WillScot’s website, rebuilt in 2024 when it folded the Mobile Mini site into its own, offers configurable packages for furniture, entrances and fencing, a fencing estimator and a search for units on sale. Configurators of this kind let a buyer assemble a building from named parts before anyone visits the site.

Behind the cabins sit corporate pages written for investors. Firms in this sector publish fleet sizes, country counts and the names of their owners: Modulaire Group, for example, gives its fleet as more than 330,000 modular space and storage units across 24 countries. This guide uses such figures only as dated, attributed statements, and notes where a claim rests on a company’s own word.

From two names to one, Right From the Start.

In North America the brand’s story ends inside a larger company. English Wikipedia says that in March 2020 Mobile Mini agreed to merge with WillScot Corporation, the Baltimore-based modular-space rental company, and that the two combined that year.

The two names did not last side by side. An entry the company submitted to the Modular Building Institute’s 2025 Awards of Distinction, in its marketing category, describes how WillScot Mobile Mini consolidated its brands under WillScot. It says marketing and digital agencies were engaged to update the brand design language system — the brand guidelines, including digital designs — and the technology behind the website. According to the entry, the new guidelines kept elements of the legacy brands while adding components for the single consolidated brand; the work began in the third quarter of 2023 and the new website launched in July 2024.

That site merged willscot.com and mobilemini.com, along with several sites from acquisitions, and the entry gives its main message plainly: “WillScot and Mobile Mini are now WillScot.” A second message was a new tagline, “Right From the Start.” English Wikipedia, citing International Rental News in July 2024, says the company took the name WillScot Holdings that year. The old Mobile Mini web address now forwards to WillScot.

Mobile Mini therefore no longer trades as a separate brand: its American business carries the WillScot name and its former UK arm sits inside Algeco.

For a design guide, Mobile Mini shows how a product brand built on one plain object — a steel box — can organise several divisions under one name and then be folded into a parent’s identity with its traces kept in the new guidelines. Compare WillScot, which absorbed its American business, and Algeco, which absorbed its UK one. For this guide we use container steel, a deep blue and a yard orange with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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