A Navy discharge, a car journey and a name.

U-Haul began in the summer of 1945 with a move that its founders could not make the way they wanted. In the company’s own account, L.S. “Sam” Shoen, just discharged from the Navy, and his wife Anna Mary Carty Shoen tried to rent a utility trailer to carry their belongings from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, and found that no one would rent one for a one-way trip. They took only what fitted in the car, and U-Haul says the couple worked out the name and the outline of a trailer rental system during that drive north.

English Wikipedia places the founding in Ridgefield, Washington, where the business began in a garage owned by Carty’s family, and U-Haul’s history page says that in the first hard winter the couple moved in with her family on their ranch. The company says the first trailers were bought from welding shops or second-hand from private owners, and that within two weeks of leaving Los Angeles the first one was parked on a service-station lot and offered for rent. By the end of 1945, it says, small open trailers were standing on station forecourts in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, Washington.

The way the business was sold shaped the way it looked. Rather than open its own lots, U-Haul placed trailers with service-station owners, who rented them out for a commission; the company says early customers were offered a discount for signing up a new agent at their destination. Those agents, now called dealers, are independent businesses rather than franchisees, the company says, and they remain part of the system it set up in 1945. English Wikipedia describes the same arrangement as an expansion through gas stations.

U-Haul says that by the end of 1949 a trailer could be rented one way between cities across most of the United States, and across most of Canada by 1955. In 1952, according to the company, a financing scheme called the Fleet Owner Program let individuals buy fleets of U-Haul trailers and share in the rental income through a company called ARCOA, Inc. The company dates its box trucks, built for household moves, to 1959.

Phoenix, a holding company and a shared fleet.

After more than two decades in the Pacific Northwest, U-Haul moved its headquarters from Portland to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1967, settling in a pair of office towers on Central Avenue that the company says now anchor its Midtown campus. In 1970 it opened the U-Haul Technical Center in Tempe, where, the company says, trailers, truck boxes and other moving products are assembled, tested and repaired. English Wikipedia describes the trucks as cabs from Ford, GMC and Ram fitted with boxes made by U-Haul at fabrication plants in North America.

The business widened in 1974 into self-storage, which the company says started as chain-link enclosures inside existing U-Haul buildings. In 1986, U-Haul says, Joe Shoen was elected chairman of AMERCO, its parent company, and turned the business back towards moving after a period of diversification; the change of control that year was followed by long-running litigation within the Shoen family. Later steps listed by the company include the website uhaul.com in 1995, the Moving Help labour marketplace in 2008, U-Box portable containers in 2011 and the self-service U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 in 2017.

The parent company changed its name in 2022: a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dated 15 November 2022, cited by English Wikipedia, records that AMERCO was now U-Haul Holding Company. The holding company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange as UHAL and is based in Phoenix; English Wikipedia names Joe Shoen as chairman and chief executive, and says the group also includes a real-estate arm and two insurance companies.

The trucks travel well beyond their home state, and CNN explained in April 2022 why U-Haul trucks carry Arizona licence plates wherever they are rented: the company registers its fleet through an apportioned plan based in Arizona. The trucks also turn up in unexpected uses. Business Insider reported in December 2015 that UPS drivers were making holiday deliveries from rented U-Haul trucks, and that some people who saw parcels being unloaded from them had called the police.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group come to the house rather than sitting on a shelf inside it: they clear drains, treat pests, dry out flooded rooms, clean carpets and move furniture and boxes from one home to the next. Home-service names sit at many different points in the trade, from businesses that grew out of a single tool or a single truck to names now run through franchise networks or owned by much larger groups.

Most people meet these brands only when something has gone wrong or something is about to change, so a service brand’s identity is carried less by a product than by what turns up at the door: a painted van or truck, a technician’s uniform, a telephone number that is easy to remember and, for some, a jingle or slogan repeated for decades on radio and television.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding, its owners over time, how its vehicles, names and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Orange paint and a gallery on wheels.

From the start, the equipment was the advertisement. U-Haul says its first trailers were painted bright orange and lettered on the sides and back with the U-Haul Co. name and a rental message, so that a trailer advertised the business whether it was on the road or parked at a station. The company describes this as the moment an identity was born, and its history page compares the orange trailers to the covered wagons of the pioneers.

The best-known layer of the livery came much later. In 1988, the company says, it launched SuperGraphics: large painted images on the sides of trucks, each honouring a U.S. state or Canadian province, with trailers honouring individual cities. A 2013 version of U-Haul’s SuperGraphics page says the first series ran under the titles “America’s Moving Adventure” and “Canada’s Moving Adventure”, with early subjects including Mount Rushmore for South Dakota and the Space Shuttle for Florida. Later in 1997 a second series, “Venture Across America” and “Venture Across Canada”, turned to less familiar local subjects. The company gives New Jersey as its example: the first graphic showed a farmer with a basket of produce for the Garden State, while the later one showed a miner holding a fluorescent mineral, a nod to the state’s mining history. U-Haul says each later graphic is researched with scientists and historians, carries the question “Where Will U Go Next?”, and is matched by a page on its website. The company also says the space on its trucks is not sold to advertisers.

Elsewhere, the identity rests on the name itself and on a phone number, 1-800-GO-U-HAUL, printed across the company’s site. For a design guide, U-Haul shows how a rental fleet can carry a brand on its own bodywork, from a single orange coat in 1945 to a rotating series of illustrated trucks. Compare it with PODS, which moves household goods in portable containers, and Two Men and a Truck, a moving company whose crews do the lifting. For this guide we use orange, asphalt and road dust with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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