A Cadillac salesman, a leasing business and a ship’s name.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car began as a leasing company. Its founder, Jack C. Taylor, was a St. Louis native who flew F6F Hellcat fighters for the U.S. Navy in the Second World War, and Auto Rental News, drawing on the company’s announcement in July 2016, reported that his service from 1942 to 1947 took him onto the decks of the aircraft carriers USS Essex and USS Enterprise. Back in St. Louis he ran a package delivery business before taking a sales job in 1948 at Lindburg Cadillac, the trade magazine and MediaPost both reported.

In 1957 Taylor founded Executive Leasing in partnership with the Lindburg family. The Associated Press reported in 2016 that the business started at the Cadillac dealership in St. Louis where he was a salesman, and Auto Rental News placed it on the dealership’s lower level. It was a small auto leasing operation to begin with. According to the company, as quoted by MediaPost and Auto Rental News, Taylor began renting cars on a small scale in 1962 as an additional service for his leasing customers, at a time when other rental companies were concentrating on airports.

That choice set the shape of the business. The Associated Press described how the company differed from competitors by letting customers pick up and drop off cars away from airports, with an employee driving out to a customer’s house or office. Auto Rental News said the company built what it called “home city” rentals for people who needed an extra car for a weekend, for visiting relatives or for students home from college, or whose own car was in the shop for repairs. English Wikipedia says that in 1994 the company adopted the slogan “We’ll pick you up,” and that in August 1998 it took legal action against Hertz and Advantage over slogans it considered too close to its own.

The name came from the war. The Associated Press reported that Taylor named his company for the USS Enterprise, and English Wikipedia dates the change from Executive Leasing to Enterprise to 1969. The full “Enterprise Rent-A-Car” name sits on the rental brand today, while the corporate parent has carried other names around it, from Enterprise Holdings to Enterprise Mobility.

From neighbourhood branches to Enterprise Mobility.

For decades Enterprise grew away from the airport counters where its rivals concentrated. English Wikipedia says the company expanded into Europe in 1994 and began adding airport locations in 1995, and that it now serves airports in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and Ireland, with franchise partners operating the brand in several other countries.

The decisive step came in 2007. The Associated Press reported in 2016 that the company bought the Alamo and National brands that year to compete for airport rentals, and that the parent changed its name to Enterprise Holdings Inc. two years later, in 2009. Auto Rental News described the 2009 name as a way of reflecting the full spread of transport services offered through Alamo, Enterprise and National, which continue as separate brands under one owner.

The family has stayed in charge throughout. Jack Taylor died in St. Louis on 2 July 2016, the Associated Press reported, citing a company statement, and his son Andrew C. Taylor was then the company’s executive chairman. In October 2023, International Fleet World reported that Enterprise Holdings had adopted Enterprise Mobility as its corporate brand, with Chrissy Taylor as president and chief executive, and that Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo would remain unchanged as offerings within the portfolio. Wikipedia gives the headquarters as Clayton, Missouri, in Greater St. Louis.

Around the rental brand, the Enterprise name has spread to related businesses. Wikipedia lists used-car sales under the name Enterprise Car Sales, commercial vans and trucks under Enterprise Truck Rental, and a campus car-sharing service, WeCar, piloted at Washington University in St. Louis in 2008 and renamed Enterprise CarShare by September 2013. In April 2015 the company acquired City Car Club in the United Kingdom and renamed it Enterprise Car Club, and in 2018 it took the naming rights to the St. Louis Blues’ arena, now Enterprise Center.

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 ship’s name, an “e” and a pair of parallel lines.

The Enterprise identity starts with a name borrowed from naval history. The company Jack Taylor built carries the name of the aircraft carrier he served on, a choice the Associated Press recorded in his 2016 obituary. The name sits on neighbourhood branch signs as well as on airport canopies, and its brand was carried for decades by local offices and by the promise, set out in its 1994 slogan, that staff would come to the customer.

The 2023 corporate rebrand looked back to the leasing years. International Fleet World reported on 26 October 2023 that the new Enterprise Mobility visual identity pays homage to the dual parallel lines of the Executive Leasing logo from 1965, and that the company adopted a new corporate purpose, “Advance the world, one journey at a time.” Chrissy Taylor told the magazine that Enterprise Mobility was “more than just an ‘e’”, and said the business had grown from a small fleet more than six decades earlier into a network serving consumers, businesses and governments.

The corporate mark and the rental brand do different jobs. Enterprise Mobility is the name on the holding company; Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National and Alamo stay as the names customers see at the counter, according to the 2023 announcement reported by International Fleet World. That split lets the family company keep the leasing-era lines in its corporate identity while leaving the rental brands as they were.

For a design guide, Enterprise shows how a private family company can build a brand on an inherited name, a single letter and a service promise, and then reach back to a 1965 leasing logo when it needs a new corporate mark. Compare it with National and Alamo, the airport brands it bought in 2007. For this guide we use branch green, deep green and leaf green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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