CARU Containers Brand Guidelines: A 2000 Rotterdam Merger That Trades and Leases Boxes

Three trading names joined in 2000.

CARU Containers is a Rotterdam company that buys, sells and leases shipping containers. Its own history starts in 2000: “In the year 2000, CARU Containers was born from a merger between CATU Rotterdam, Trade Craft and Lease Craft,” its website says, and its list of milestones opens that year with the founding of CARU Containers B.V. and a container depot in Rotterdam. The company credits Rob Tromp and Paul Ockers with the merger, which it says made container trading “more professional and human.”

Trade press describes it in the same terms. In November 2013 WorldCargo News called CARU Containers BV a “Rotterdam-based container lessor” when it reported an investment by the company. In June 2025 Sourcing Journal introduced it, in an interview with its general manager for North America, Michael Goldman, as a global company “with Dutch roots.”

The people at the top are named on the company’s own team page, which in November 2026 listed Lennart de Bruin as chief executive, Chiel Rietvelt as chief financial officer and Rob Tromp as owner; the introduction on the same site still calls Tromp “our current CEO,” so the two pages differ on his title. The team page also lists a global brand manager.

Its size is given in the company’s own words. The website says it trades and leases new and used containers across the globe, “operating from offices in 8 countries,” and its country selector lists Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States. In the 2025 interview Goldman said the company worked from 10 offices and was active in more than 70 countries. The website also says CARU has grown into “one of the largest traders of containers in the world”; that is the company’s own description.

From one depot to eight countries.

CARU grew mainly by buying or opening local businesses, according to the milestone list on its website. It acquired CARU Praha s.r.o. in the Czech Republic in 2005 and founded CARU Containers BVBA for Belgium and France in 2006. In 2009 it moved into Germany and the United States: in Germany it took over R. Thollembeek GmbH of Böblingen, which had specialised in technical container solutions and has traded as CARU Containers GmbH since 2014, and in the US it founded CARU Containers Inc. in Boston. Containerhandel IG of Gothenburg, in Sweden, followed in 2010; a joint venture with West Gulf Containers of Houston, renamed CARU Containers West Gulf, in 2011; and CARU Containers Ltda in Brazil in 2020.

The German business also produced a separate line. In 2015, the company says, it opened a sales office for CARU Tech Containers in Sindelfingen, responsible for selling technical, custom-built container solutions for the group. Online, it ran what it calls an experiment in 2016, zeecontainer.nl, which it describes as the first fully automated container web shop in the Benelux.

The business model is spelled out in the 2025 interview. Goldman told Sourcing Journal that CARU trades new and used shipping containers, leases containers to major shipping lines and buys decommissioned fleets from some of the industry’s largest players, then resells those boxes through several channels for reuse, including domestic commercial storage. He named ocean shipping, international freight forwarding and domestic container storage as its main markets, and said the company had recently invested in its One-Way Lease service, which matches empty containers with cargo heading to the same place, so that one container makes the trip instead of two.

The website follows that split between shipping and storage. Its menus separate shipping containers from storage containers, offer 20-foot, 40-foot and 40-foot high-cube boxes in an “as-is” grade, invite buyers of more than ten containers to ask for a tailored offer, and include an off-hire portal.

Design and documentation.

Container lessors own the steel boxes that shipping lines fill and move. A carrier that does not want to buy every box it needs can lease them for a few months or many years, return them at a depot and lease again somewhere else. The lessors earn their names on the boxes themselves: a company wordmark, often in a strong blue, orange or green, painted on the doors and sides of containers that travel the world’s ports and railways for years.

Their websites are built around that fleet. Most sort it by box type: standard and high-cube dry containers for general cargo; refrigerated containers, or reefers, for chilled and frozen goods; tank containers for liquids; and specials such as flat racks, open tops and palletwide boxes for cargo that does not fit a standard van. Photographs of stacked dry, reefer and tank containers, as the companies publish them, do much of the visual work, together with technical sheets that give each box’s dimensions and standards.

The next layer is the network. Lessors publish depot maps and depot finders, lists of regional offices and customer portals where shipping lines can book, return and track their units. Many also sell boxes: pages for the sale of used containers offer units at the end of their marine life for storage, conversion or one more trip, and some lessors invite outside investors to own container portfolios that the lessor manages.

Behind the boxes sits finance. Container leasing is a business of long-lived assets and long contracts, so ownership matters, and many of the companies in this series have been merged, listed, taken private or folded into larger groups. Their investor pages and press releases are where those changes are recorded, and this guide sets out what each company’s own pages and dated reports show.

Harvest gold, second-hand.

CARU has also put money into new container designs. In November 2013 WorldCargo News reported that the company was taking a 5% stake, through its investment company PORT Holdings BV, in Holland Container Innovations, the developer of the 4Fold collapsible 40-foot container; the terms were not disclosed. The investment also appears in CARU’s own milestone list for 2013.

For most buyers, though, CARU’s product is the used box. Its FAQ says the majority of its used containers are former Mediterranean Shipping Company containers, “harvest gold in color,” and that they are on average 15 years old. It explains its grades — Cargo Worthy, Wind and Water Tight, and As-is — and says every supplier defines those terms differently, so it sets out its own. It also explains that a high-cube container is 30 centimetres taller than a standard one. A company profile on Offshore Technology adds offshore containers for sale and rent, described as built to the ISO and DNV 2.7-1 standards, and lists customers ranging from shipping lines and transport firms to municipalities and defence forces.

The name also appears outside the trade. English Wikipedia’s page on the 2025–26 Eredivisie season lists Caru Containers as the sleeve sponsor of Excelsior Rotterdam, a club from the company’s home city. On its about page the company calls the container “an unpretentious product” and “the invention of the 20th century,” and says it aims to make buying and leasing containers “simple, human, transparent, and fun.”

For a design guide, CARU Containers shows how a container trader can build a brand around the second-hand box itself — its colour, its grade and its age. Compare Textainer, a container lessor founded in 1979, and SEA BOX, a New Jersey container maker that, like CARU, has worked with a collapsible-container developer. For this guide we use a harvest gold and a deep harbour navy with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CARU Containers’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.