HSS Hire Brand Guidelines: A 1957 Kensington Hire Shop Turned Online Marketplace

A west London shop, then three initials.

HSS began as a single shop in west London. English Wikipedia says Bert Taylor founded The Hire Service Company in 1957 on Baron’s Court Road in Kensington, a shop given over to tool and equipment hire, and opened five more shops in west central London during the 1960s. The Construction Index, in a feature first published in its January 2026 magazine, gives the same founder and year, calls HSS “the original high-street hire shop” and describes it as the UK’s oldest tool-hire business.

The initials came from a merger. Towards the end of the 1960s, English Wikipedia says, the business was bought by the scaffolding group SGB, which owned eight tool rental shops trading as Hire Shops Limited; the two names were combined as Hire Service Shops Limited, shortened to HSS.

Ownership then passed through several hands. The construction group John Mowlem sold HSS to the listed Davis Service Group in 1993, The Guardian reported in December 2003, when Davis sold it on to the investment firm 3i after a nine-month process. HSS’s managing director told the paper the business was gaining its independence for the first time in 40 years; it also traded in the United States at the time, as HSS RentX. In 2007 3i sold HSS to Och-Ziff, and in October 2012, KHL reported, Och-Ziff and Perry Capital sold the business to Exponent Private Equity of London.

KHL’s 2012 report gives a snapshot of the network at that point: about 2,000 staff and 230 distribution centres and branches across the UK and Ireland. It said HSS had been famous for hundreds of depots in city-centre and high-street locations, had once been a business of 450 depots, and was shifting toward larger distribution centres in a hub-and-spoke structure, aimed at professional customers in construction, facilities management, retail and industry.

A listing, branch closures and a switch to digital.

HSS returned to the stock market in February 2015 as HSS Hire Group plc. English Wikipedia lists the specialist hire firms bought around that time, including the generator hire companies ABIRD in 2012 and Apex Generators in 2014, and the heating and cooling hire company All Seasons Hire in 2015.

The years after the listing were hard. In 2020, The Construction Index reported, HSS announced the closure of 134 of its 240 branches, having lost money in each of the five years since floating. It had already begun to change how hire was ordered: in 2019 it launched OneCall, a rehire service built on its own technology platform, nicknamed “Brenda,” to source equipment from a network of suppliers. The company said at the time of the closures that around 30% of new contracts were raised through digital channels, the magazine recalled.

In 2024 HSS launched ProService Marketplace, a fully digital service which, according to The Construction Index, promised customers access to more than 900 suppliers and 50,000 product lines. “We sit between the customer and the supplier – we don’t own any assets,” its chief executive, who had run the HSS online operation since it began in 2017, told the magazine.

The Irish business went its own way. In April 2025 Grafton Group agreed to buy HSS Hire Ireland, which RTÉ said ran four branches and four customer distribution centres, to operate within Grafton’s Chadwicks business; RTÉ reported in July 2026 that Grafton had bought it in May 2025.

How hire companies present themselves.

Equipment rental and hire companies sell access rather than ownership, so their public identity is spread across depots, machines, vans and screens. This guide looks at the places where those identities appear as the companies publish them: photographs of depots and fleets, livery colours on machines and vans, online hire catalogues and apps, and the corporate pages that describe branches, listings and owners. No product or mark of any company is reproduced.

Much of the business has moved online. Sunbelt Rentals launched a mobile app in March 2022 that lets customers find, reserve and manage equipment and view invoices, the company said at the time. United Rentals added Equipment Fit, an augmented-reality feature for placing 3D models of machines on a jobsite, in August 2025, and an AI-based Equipment Agent for choosing equipment in March 2026, according to its own announcements. Sunbelt Rentals’ own website lists more than 14,000 product types, sorted into groups such as aerial work platforms, compaction and concrete equipment.

Corporate pages tell a different story: depots, listings and owners. Branch counts are a common headline figure, and they change with each takeover, so this guide gives them only as dated sources state them. Ownership changes are frequent too. In February 2025, Transport Topics reported that Herc Rentals had outbid United Rentals for H&E Equipment Services, and in March 2026 Sunbelt Rentals moved its primary listing from London to the New York Stock Exchange, the company said.

Each guide that follows sets out who founded the company, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Rental prices, fleet values and revenue are left out throughout.

The branches go; the initials stay online.

The decisive step came in October 2025. The Construction Index reported on 6 October that all 39 HSS branches and the 65 outlets it ran inside builders’ merchants were being transferred, with the hire inventory, to Endless LLP, a London private equity investor whose portfolio, the magazine noted, has ranged from Crown Paints to Hovis, while ProService kept its distribution centres and signed a five-year supply agreement with Speedy Hire. Speedy bought some equipment and depot leases and took a 9.99% stake in ProService. The Competition and Markets Authority cleared the Speedy arrangement in November 2025, Construction Wave reported, and it began on 18 November. The former hire network now trades under Endless as The Hire Service Company, or THSC — the name Bert Taylor’s shop carried in 1957.

The listed company changed its name as well. Speedy’s June 2026 results refer to it as ProService Building Services Marketplace plc, and by November 2025 the group was presenting itself as HSS ProService Marketplace, Construction Wave reported. The HSS initials survive online: the hss.com website, run by HSS ProService Ltd, offers tool hire and equipment sales under the name HSS DIY and directs business accounts to HSS ProService Marketplace. The brand that began as a shop window no longer runs hire branches of its own in Britain.

For a design guide, HSS Hire shows how three letters can outlast the shops that made them familiar, moving from high-street shopfronts to a website and a marketplace. Compare Speedy Hire, now its principal equipment supplier, and Sunbelt Rentals, the name that replaced A-Plant in Britain in 2020, according to The Construction Index. For this guide we use a deep teal, charcoal and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep HSS Hire’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.