A family office, a dictionary and a cousin’s husband in Chicago.

Budget Rent a Car began in Southern California in 1958. Auto Rental News reported in November 2013 that Morris (Morey) Mirkin opened the original Budget Rent A Car office on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills on 15 June 1958, with money borrowed from his mother-in-law; the company’s own timeline gives the founding city as Los Angeles. The magazine described the business as a cheaper, local alternative to the rental companies at Los Angeles airport.

The name has two origin stories, one from the family and one from the company. Mirkin’s son Jeff told Auto Rental News that he remembered sitting in the living room as a small child while his father planned a new business, and that the family pulled out a dictionary and settled on the word Budget. The company timeline says the name was chosen to appeal to the “budget-minded” or “value-conscious” renter. The same magazine article describes Budget in its earliest days as a family affair: Jeff Mirkin said he helped his father, mother and grandfather paint the original rental office, that his father started with a small number of used cars kept running by a mechanic on the lot, and that many of the early franchisees were relatives.

Growth came through a relative by marriage. Auto Rental News reported that Mirkin wanted to franchise from the start and enlisted Jules Lederer, a Chicagoan married to Mirkin’s cousin, the advice columnist Ann Landers, who brought fleet financing and business experience. The company timeline says Lederer set up a leasing company in 1959 to help Mirkin enlarge the fleet, and that in 1960 the two men formed Budget Rent a Car Corporation in Chicago. Mirkin stayed in Los Angeles to oversee the Southern California franchises while Lederer travelled the country signing up franchisees, the magazine said, and new franchisees were sent to Los Angeles to learn the rental business from Mirkin.

The family connection lasted beyond the founders’ years. Auto Rental News reported in 2013 that the Mirkin family was still the master franchisee for Southern California, and quoted former Budget executives describing the early franchisees as independent entrepreneurs who drove the brand’s spread. When the company encouraged them to move onto airport sites after a 1976 Federal Trade Commission consent decree opened airport desks to more bidders, Jeff Mirkin recalled, there was a real debate inside the system about whether it was wise.

Transamerica, a buyout, Team Rental, Cendant and Avis Budget Group.

Budget left its founders’ hands in 1968, when, Auto Rental News reported, it was sold to Transamerica. The company timeline says that in 1986 the investment firm Gibbons, Green and van Amerongen, together with management and selected investors, bought Budget from Transamerica in a leveraged buyout, and that Budget announced a public share offering in 1987. In 1992 it moved its headquarters from downtown Chicago to the suburb of Lisle, Illinois.

The next owner came from inside the system. The company timeline says that in 1997 Budget was bought by Team Rental Group, one of its own U.S. franchisees, which renamed the combined business Budget Group, Inc. and listed it on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1998 Budget Group acquired the truck-rental business Ryder TRS and combined it with Budget Truck Rental, and by 2002 the two had been merged under the single Budget Truck Rental name.

The Chicago Tribune reported on 21 August 2002 that Budget Group, based in Lisle, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection the previous month, and that Cendant, already the owner of Avis, had reached a deal with its creditors to buy the car-rental business. The newspaper quoted the industry consultant Neil Abrams, who said Budget would give Cendant a stronger presence with leisure and local renters alongside Avis, which catered more to business travellers. The company timeline says Cendant bought Budget’s rental assets in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, while other international assets went to Avis Europe plc, and that the Budget headquarters moved from Lisle to Parsippany, New Jersey.

In 2006, the company timeline says, Cendant separated into four companies, and Budget Rent A Car System, Inc. became a subsidiary of Avis Budget Group, the car-rental company that kept the old corporate shell. English Wikipedia, citing Travel Weekly, says Cendant renamed itself Avis Budget Group that year. Avis Budget Group has owned Budget since 2006 and runs it from Parsippany alongside Avis.

Design and documentation.

A car-rental brand is met in a handful of places before anyone sits behind the wheel: an airport sign pointing to a counter or a garage level, the counter itself, a shuttle bus that loops between terminals and lots, and the lot signage that marks rows, return lanes and exits. Each is a different surface with a different job, from a backlit panel read from across a terminal hall to a painted bus side seen in motion and a small paper or plastic key tag handed over at the end of the process.

That spread of surfaces is what a rental wordmark, its colours and any symbol beside it have to cover, at very different sizes and distances. The same name may appear on a uniform, a bay marker, a receipt and a mobile app, and the business behind it may have changed hands more than once since the sign was first painted.

Each guide that follows sets out who started the name, who has owned it since and how its marks have changed, and separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A name that is also a promise, painted on a truck.

The Budget identity starts with its name, a single ordinary word. The company’s timeline says the name was picked to speak to value-conscious renters, and the founder’s son remembers it coming out of a dictionary on the family’s living-room floor. That plain word sat over a small office on Wilshire Boulevard before it sat over airport desks, and it has stayed unchanged through every owner since.

The clearest record of the brand in physical form comes from the trucks. The company timeline says Budget Truck Rental’s newly designed blue trucks began leaving the manufacturing plant in October 2001. When Ryder TRS was folded in, the timeline says, Budget began retiring the bright yellow Ryder TRS trucks from the fleet in 2002 and replacing them with new blue Budget trucks, swapped Ryder TRS signs for Budget signs across the country, and in 2003 reintroduced redesigned former Ryder trucks with Budget logos. A year later it bought new white trucks of a redesigned type for the rental fleet.

The pairing with Avis gives Budget a clear role in its owner’s portfolio. In 2002 the Chicago Tribune quoted an industry consultant who saw Budget as the leisure and local partner to Avis, the business-travel brand, and the two names have since shared a corporate parent and a headquarters in Parsippany. The Mirkin family’s continuing franchise in Southern California, reported by Auto Rental News in 2013, keeps a direct link back to the office the founder and his family painted themselves.

For a design guide, Budget shows how a name that states its promise can do much of a brand’s work, leaving the trucks, signs and counters to carry it in simple colour. Compare it with Avis, its stablemate under Avis Budget Group, and U-Haul, whose painted trucks carry another rental brand on the road. For this guide we use truck blue, navy and signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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