A pipeline company named for a mission.

Valero takes its name from its home city’s past. The International Directory of Company Histories says the name came from the Mission of San Antonio de Valero, the original name of the Alamo, and Valero’s own history says the same. The company dates its birth to January 1, 1980, as the corporate successor of the Lo-Vaca Gathering Company, a natural gas pipeline subsidiary of the Houston-based Coastal company, known in its earlier years as Coastal States Gas Corporation.

Its origin lies in a regulatory ruling. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, the Texas Railroad Commission ruled in December 1977 on Lo-Vaca’s broken gas-supply contracts, and to satisfy that ruling Coastal’s intrastate Texas gas-gathering pipeline was spun off as a new company, Valero, based in San Antonio. Its president was Bill Greehey, who had been the court-appointed head of Lo-Vaca and had helped negotiate the settlement that created Valero, the directory says.

Through the 1980s and 1990s Valero was a pipeline and refining business rather than a name on forecourts. The company says it commissioned a full-scale refinery at Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1984, and that in 1997 it merged its natural gas business with PG&E Corporation while spinning its refining assets into a new public company, still called Valero Energy Corporation. Valero says it bought the Paulsboro refinery in New Jersey from Mobil in 1998. For two decades, then, the Valero name sat on pipelines and refineries in Texas rather than on station canopies.

From Diamond Shamrock to teal and yellow.

The Valero name reached the roadside in 2000. Valero says it bought Exxon’s Benicia refinery in Northern California that year, marking its entry into retail and branded wholesale; the International Directory of Company Histories says the purchase included a group of gasoline stations and that Valero soon introduced the Valero retail brand at some of them. English Wikipedia says those were Exxon-branded stations, mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A larger change followed. Valero completed its purchase of San Antonio’s Ultramar Diamond Shamrock on the last day of 2001, the directory says, taking over stations that traded as Diamond Shamrock, Ultramar and Beacon. For a while Valero ran several station names at once.

On June 30, 2005, CSP Daily News reported that Valero would retire the Diamond Shamrock brand and convert its sites to the Valero image, bringing what the paper called Valero’s “distinctive teal-and-yellow signs” to stations stretching from South Dakota to South Texas and from Arizona to Arkansas. “We are very excited about having the Valero name on our retail and wholesale sites across the country,” Greehey, then chairman and chief executive, said. He added that the company expected to benefit from national advertising and from sponsorships such as the Valero Texas Open golf tournament, and that “there’s a significant value to having our name in front of customers.” The Valero name was to go on branded wholesale sites that met the company’s image requirements, while Valero kept its Shamrock and Beacon names as value brands for smaller sites, and its Canadian stations continued under the Ultramar name, CSP reported.

Valero later stepped back from running stations itself. Its history says its retail business was divested in 2013; English Wikipedia records that Valero spun off those operations that year as a new public company, CST Brands, while continuing to supply stations that use brand names Valero owns.

The forecourt.

A fuel brand is met mostly at the roadside, and much of its identity is built for people moving at speed. The canopy over the pumps is a large branded surface, carrying a band of colour and a name or mark along its edge so that it reads from the road and at night under its own lights.

The tall sign at the entrance, often called a price pylon or price sign, does two jobs: it carries the brand’s mark at the top and a set of changeable figures below it. In a brand system the mark and the frame stay fixed while the figures change, so the sign is designed around the space the numbers will take.

At the pump itself the brand appears again on toppers, panels and nozzle labels, at a scale meant for someone standing beside the car. Forecourt colour ties these pieces together: the same hues on canopy, pumps, kiosk and sign let a station read as one place from a distance.

Each guide looks at how one name has carried its mark across those surfaces, who has owned it and how its signs have changed, and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

Vanguard.

In April 2018 Valero announced a new branded station design called Vanguard. CSP Daily News reported on April 18, 2018 that Valero had weighed more than a dozen alternative designs in a national consumer survey, and that consumers chose Vanguard as their overall favourite; they liked its progressive and modern look, Valero said. The design was to be offered to the company’s marketers and distributors from the second quarter of that year.

The design came from Antista Fairclough, a branding firm based in Atlanta, which CSP said had long worked with Valero and had created the Ultramar station design used in Canada. “Vanguard evolved after a process of fully understanding Valero’s brand strategies and its customer base,” said Thomas Fairclough, the firm’s co-owner. “Valero’s brand heritage and image played an important role in the new design.” English Wikipedia describes the change as covering the logo, the canopy and the store facade, in hues of blue, white and yellow, and says Valero expected the rollout to take several months.

The company presented Vanguard as a tool for the people who run stations under its name. “Vanguard demonstrates our commitment to continue growing the Valero brand,” Eric Fisher, Valero’s vice president of wholesale marketing and international commercial operations, told CSP. Valero also said the new look would let its marketers explore markets abroad, particularly Mexico; CSP noted that Chevron, Arco, Mobil and BP were among the other fuel brands with plans for the Mexican gas-station market at the time. In the company’s words, the design was “a distinctive tool” for its marketers, who carry the Valero name on their own stations. Valero Energy Corporation remains headquartered in San Antonio, the city whose mission gave it its name.

For a design guide, Valero shows how a name taken from a city’s mission travelled from a pipeline company to a canopy, and how one station look replaced several. Compare Mobil, whose Paulsboro refinery Valero bought in 1998, and Exxon, whose Benicia refinery it bought in 2000. For this guide we use a teal, a yellow and a blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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