About Spinnaker

Spinnaker was founded in San Francisco in 2000, when a small group of logistics veterans got tired of watching customers get quoted one price and charged another. Twenty-six years later, that same stubborn insistence on straight answers is still what runs the place. We buy, sell, and lease shipping containers out of more than 60 depots across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and along the way we’ve become one of the largest independently owned resellers of shipping containers and storage containers in the country.

Every unit that leaves a Spinnaker yard has been inspected, tagged, and tracked by our own team, whether it’s headed to a construction site in Ohio or a retail operation in Sacramento.

We’ve had customers call us the week before a job starts because another supplier fell through on availability, and we’ve had customers who’ve leased from us every year since the mid-2000s without ever shopping around. Both kinds of relationships tell us the same thing: nobody sticks with a broker who guesses at what’s in stock. When we tell a customer a unit is sitting at a depot, it’s sitting at that depot.

Ready to lease or buy? Contact us now and fill out our quick quote form.

Spinnaker runs a fleet of more than 120,000 CEUs (that’s the industry’s way of measuring container capacity), and we lease that equipment to shipping lines, freight forwarders, and businesses that need extra capacity without the upfront cost of ownership. On the flip side, we sell shipping containers and storage containers outright to companies and operations in need of containers for long-term use.

Between those two paths, we offer a handful of ways to structure a deal:

• Long-term leases for companies that need containers year after year
• One-way leases for a single trip between ports
• Short-term and master leases for seasonal or project-based work
• Sale-and-leaseback arrangements for businesses looking to free up capital
• Finance leases for buyers who want ownership at the end of the term

Our team walks each client through container size, condition grade, and acquisition method before anything gets signed.

Most people picture the same rusty box when they hear “shipping container,” but the inventory we move is a lot more specific than that. We stock standard dry containers, high cubes, open tops, flat racks, and refrigerated units for cold chain freight, along with one-trip and cargo-worthy grades depending on what a customer actually needs.

The demand for storage containers looks different from the demand for freight-ready equipment, and we treat it that way. A general contractor who needs a singular container for tools on a job site doesn’t need the same certification as a shipper sending cargo overseas, so we grade and price these units separately from equipment built for active ocean transport. Farms needing dry equipment storage, schools short on classroom space, and retailers storing seasonal inventory all lease storage containers from us for the same reason: it’s cheaper and faster than constructing permanent buildings.

Not sure which container fits your project? Contact us and one of our specialists will walk the options with you. No pressure, just a straight answer and a quote form you can fill out in under two minutes.

A container company is only as good as its ability to get equipment to you on time, and that’s where scale matters. Spinnaker operates out of major port cities and inland hubs, including San Francisco, Oakland, Long Beach, Miami, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Detroit, Louisville, Baltimore, New York, Boston, Charleston, and Savannah, plus depots across Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. That footprint means we’re rarely trucking a container across three states just to fill an order, which keeps delivery windows tighter and freight costs down.

Because we hold inventory in so many regions, customers looking for shipping containers or storage containers near a specific port or metro area usually find what they need already close by, rather than waiting on a unit to ship in from across the country. For customers near the coasts, that typically means delivery within the week. Inland orders sometimes take a bit longer depending on how far a unit has to travel from the closest depot, but our team gives a realistic delivery window upfront instead of a best-case number that slips twice.

Every one of our depots runs the same basic drill before a unit gets released: a structural check on the frame and corner castings, a floor inspection for rot or weak spots, a door and seal test to make sure nothing lets in weather, and a check against the CSC (Container Safety Convention) plate to confirm the unit is still within its certification window. Refrigerated equipment gets an additional run of the cooling unit before it ships.

We grade what comes through as new, one-trip, cargo-worthy, or wind-and-watertight, and we tell customers exactly which grade they’re getting before money changes hands. A lot of resellers blur that line because a lower grade sells for less. We’d rather lose a sale than have a customer find out three weeks later that the shipping containers they bought weren’t what the listing implied.

Reputation in this industry gets built slowly and lost fast. We’ve spent close to a quarter century on the slow version. A few things customers mention when they explain why they keep coming back:

• Pricing that matches the quote, not a revised number after the truck shows up
• A single point of contact instead of a call center that starts from scratch every time
• Inspection standards that catch structural issues before a container leaves the yard
• Financing and leasing options flexible enough to fit a one-person job site or a national retailer

None of that happens by accident. It happens because the people answering your call have usually been doing this for years, not weeks.

It shows up in the form of pricing confirmation the same day a bid is due, a delivery that arrives on the date it was promised, or an invoice that matches the quote to the dollar.

Spinnaker is run by a team with decades of combined experience in container leasing, maritime logistics, and equipment finance, not a group that pivoted into containers because the margins looked good. Our leadership includes former operators from the shipping and leasing side of the industry, which is part of why our container specification lookup and SOLAS tare weight tools exist in the first place: we built the resources we wished we’d had earlier in our own careers.

We also work with investors who buy into our lease fleet, and we’re upfront with them the same way we’re upfront with our customers.

Reconditioning plays a bigger role in the business than most people expect, too. A unit that’s aged out of active ocean freight is often still structurally sound, so instead of scrapping it, our depots repair, reseal, and repaint what can be saved and put it back into service as ground-level storage. It’s a smaller footprint than manufacturing new steel, and for most customers it’s also the more practical option for their budget.

Whether you’re outfitting a job site, expanding warehouse capacity, or just need a dry place to keep equipment for a few months, the fastest way to find out what it costs is to ask. Spinnaker has been solving these problems with shipping containers and storage containers for over 25 years, and we’d rather answer your questions directly than have you guess from a price list. 

Talk to a real person, not a call queue. Contact us or complete our quote form and get container pricing built around your job, not a generic size chart.