Kiloutou Brand Guidelines: Franky Mulliez’s 1980 Lille Hire Shops and “Yellow Blood”

An idea brought back from the United States.

Kiloutou was founded in 1980 by Franky Mulliez. French Wikipedia gives the date as 19 May 1980 and describes him as a son of Francis Mulliez, of the family behind the Auchan retail group. The company’s history page says the idea came from a trip to the United States, where Mulliez saw a busy market for renting small equipment and tools, and that he brought the concept back to France.

The first offer was broad. According to the company, Mulliez gathered more than 700 products, for do-it-yourself, gardening, sport and leisure, in his first three shops at Marcq-en-Barœul, Lille and Roubaix, in the Nord département. Within five years, the history page says with some humour, it was clear that surfboards, candyfloss machines and disco balls had no place in the business, and Kiloutou turned gradually towards construction equipment. In less than ten years, it says, the company employed 350 people in 23 branches, and it opened its capital to its staff.

The 1990s and early 2000s brought scale. The company says it became, in 1998, the first rental company to be certified to the ISO 9002 quality standard. It counts 75 branches and about 1,400 staff in 2000, the year it launched its first website, and says it opened a test centre for equipment in 2002 and an internal training school in Marcq-en-Barœul in 2007. Its registered head office is now in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, near Lille, according to the group’s legal notice, while French Wikipedia notes that its sales and marketing management sits at Thiais, near Paris.

Three owners in thirteen years.

Kiloutou changed hands several times after its founder stepped back. In 2005 the investment firm Sagard Private Equity became majority shareholder, and Franky Mulliez stepped aside while staying involved, the company says. In 2011 the French investor PAI Partners bought Sagard’s shares, both French Wikipedia and the company record. In 2019, the company says, Kiloutou entered the bond market with its first public issue, listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange.

In late November 2017 the holding companies HLDI and HLD Europe entered exclusive talks to buy a majority stake from PAI and Sagard, French Wikipedia says. On 12 January 2018 Le Figaro reported that France’s competition authority had cleared the takeover of Kiloutou by Dentressangle Initiatives, the group controlled by the family of Norbert Dentressangle, under its simplified procedure, because that group held no business in equipment hire. The company describes the 2018 change as HLD, a company owned by Dentressangle, becoming majority shareholder. Its board in 2026 includes Franky Mulliez as founder, alongside members from the Dentressangle group and HLD.

Growth abroad came after 2013. The company lists its first foreign purchase that year, BM Loc in Poland, followed by Rentecnika in Spain in 2015, Starlift in Germany in 2016, Cofiloc in Italy in 2017, and GSV in Denmark and Grupo Vendap in Portugal in 2022. The trade site Batiweb reported on 23 March 2022 that the GSV agreement had been signed with the fund CataCap the day before, giving Kiloutou 19 more branches; executive chairman Olivier Colleau called it the group’s largest purchase. In April 2026 International Rental News reported that Kiloutou had acquired KDM Hire, a business based in Cookstown, Northern Ireland, with seven locations including Belfast, Dublin and Cork, its first move into the UK and Irish markets.

The company now gives its size as 637 branches, about 7,100 staff and 350,000 items of equipment in nine countries, and calls itself the third-largest generalist equipment rental company in Europe; French Wikipedia describes it as the second-largest equipment rental group in France.

Design and documentation.

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.

Yellow, and now green.

Yellow sits at the centre of how Kiloutou talks about itself. Its history page describes the commitment of staff as what is called “yellow blood” in the company’s corridors, its supplier event is named the Yellow Partner’s Days, and when it gathered its hybrid, electric and other alternative machines into the iMPAKT range in 2021, the slogan it chose was “Now yellow also comes in green.” The company says that range has grown to more than 3,500 items.

The identity itself was redrawn in 2016. According to the company, Kiloutou gave itself a new visual identity that year, “simplified and easily identifiable,” and in 2018 that look led to an advertising campaign “that only professionals understand,” aimed at its main customers, the building trades. The same history records the launch of Kiloutou Matériel d’Occasion, for selling used equipment, in 2016, and the grouping of specialist networks in 2015: Kiloutou Energie, Kiloutou Module and Loca Réception, joined by Kiloutou Signalisation in 2020.

Other recent steps follow the same theme. In June 2024, French Wikipedia says, Kiloutou and the French maker Manitou showed an electric retrofit of a telescopic handler. The company notes that the European Rental Association named it its rental company of the year, and says EcoVadis has rated it at Gold level every year since 2019.

For a design guide, Kiloutou shows how a single strong colour can carry a brand from a few Lille-area tool shops to a nine-country network, and how a slogan can stretch that colour to cover a new range. Compare Loxam, the other large French hire group, in red, and Boels, the Dutch hire group from Sittard. For this guide we use a hire yellow, workshop black and a low-carbon green with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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