Kennards Hire Brand Guidelines: A 1948 Bathurst Concrete Mixer and a Corporate Red

One concrete mixer, hired instead of sold.

Kennards Hire traces its start to Bathurst, in regional New South Wales, in 1948. English Wikipedia says Walter Kennard founded W Kennard Agencies there that year, selling equipment and machinery and acting as an agent for brands including Caltex, Hillman, Humber and Lightburn. The hire idea, by the company’s account, came when he hired out a concrete mixer from the family’s small machinery business instead of selling it. The University of Sydney’s alumni magazine told the same story in July 2018, describing a customer who asked to borrow the mixer from his equipment retail business.

The business moved to Sydney in 1951, English Wikipedia says, working at first from a garage in Mosman. It diversified into making roof racks and in 1954 was renamed W Kennard Industries, with operations in Artarmon, on Sydney’s lower north shore. It moved to the Pacific Highway at Greenwich in 1960, opened a second branch at Rydalmere in 1967 and a third at Alexandria in 1969, and moved its Greenwich branch back to Artarmon in 1972.

The company still leads with that start. In a September 2026 post on its website it described itself as “Proudly family-owned since 1948,” and said that more than 78 years on it had more than 220 branches and over 2,200 team members across Australia and New Zealand. English Wikipedia describes it simply as an Australian privately owned equipment hire company.

Two Kennards, one family.

There are two Kennards businesses, and the split is part of the brand story. In 1973, English Wikipedia says, Kennards built six self-storage garages behind its Moorebank hire store, first branded Kennards Mini Storage and renamed Easi-Stor in 1979. By 1990 the business had 14 branches in Sydney, Newcastle and Brisbane. In 1991 Walter Kennard’s sons Andy and Neville, who had taken over the business, divided it: Andy kept equipment hire and Neville took self storage. English Wikipedia cites a 2013 Intelligent Investor column by Alan Kohler titled “Why there are two Kennards.” The University of Sydney’s 2018 profile likewise described Kennards Storage as a separate business, owned by cousins.

Growth on the hire side came through purchases and new branches. Kennards Hire bought eight stores from GKN in 1992 and the remaining ten two years later, English Wikipedia says; by 2000 it had a presence in every mainland state, and in 2012 it entered New Zealand through an acquisition. The alumni magazine counted more than 170 branches in Australia and New Zealand in 2018, against the more than 220 the company cited in 2026. The magazine linked the early success to the building boom of the period and noted a property holding that supports the hire business, with one of Angus Kennard’s siblings managing the property side and another on the company’s board.

The family still runs it. The 2018 profile described Angus Kennard, Walter’s grandson, as chief executive since 2016, appointed after an interview panel questioned him on how he would lead a family business, and said family members had to work five years elsewhere before joining the company. It quoted his description of the stores as a “mile wide, inch deep” model, offering many products that are easy to use, now paired with an “inch wide, mile deep” strategy of specialist solutions, such as equipment for lifting bridges supplied with the engineers needed to run it. Being private, he told the magazine, let the company make decisions that cost it in the short term but suit the long term.

How rental 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.

Restored vehicles in corporate red.

The visual heritage is red. The same 2018 profile described two rooms behind the busy Artarmon branch known as “the museum,” holding old but well-kept equipment, family photographs and fully restored 1950s work vehicles “painted Kennard corporate red.” There is no sign outside it, the magazine said; asked what the collection stands for, Angus Kennard answered, “Respect for legacy.”

The brand also travels on football shirts. In July 2017 Sydney FC announced Kennards Hire as a premium partner and back-of-shirt sponsor for three seasons, with its logo on the club’s home, away and alternate playing kits; the club’s chairman called it a family-owned business that matched the club’s values. Kennards Hire replaced StarTrack in that spot, Sydney FC said, and the partnership began on 13 July 2017, the night the club played a friendly against Arsenal at ANZ Stadium.

Its own channels lean on the family story and on range. The website pairs a branch finder and an equipment catalogue for home renovators and trades with a commercial side covering case studies, industry solutions and specialist teams for major projects, power and water management. Its news posts in 2026 marked National Family Business Day and followed a company vehicle called Car Ken through a charity motoring event in South Australia, where the team handed out Matchbox cars and merchandise and showed children around the vehicle, the post said.

For a design guide, Kennards Hire shows how a founder’s surname, a founding story and one corporate colour can hold a hire business together through more than seven decades of growth. Compare U-Haul, another rental name that started in the 1940s, and Loxam, a French equipment rental group. For this guide we use a workshop red, a charcoal and a warm concrete with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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