A wholesale container supplier since 1994.
One Way Lease, Inc. supplies new, used, and factory-built shipping containers to portable-storage operators, shipping lines, freight forwarders, and corporate buyers across the U.S. Our fleet ships under the OWLU® BIC prefix from 12 U.S. depots.
What we sell.
Four service lines. All operator-direct.
Container sales
New (one-trip) and graded used inventory, 10ʹ through 53ʹ. Standard dry-vans and specialty units — open-top, flat-rack, reefer, tank.
New factory production
Built to spec at the factory. Doors, windows, vents, paint to your RAL code, branded for the customer or shipped neutral.
One-way leasing
Point-to-point under the OWLU® prefix. You move the container where you need it; we keep the BIC paperwork in order.
Traditional leasing
Project leases, term leases, units held at your depots, recurring fleet draws. Built for operators with predictable container demand.
Three decades of selling containers.
Howard Leggett founded One Way Lease, Inc. in 1994 to do one thing well — supply containers, wholesale, to the operators who actually use them. 32 years later the work is the same. The fleet is larger.
We sit between two ends of the container industry. On one side is supply: new builds from factories in Asia, and units sourced here in the U.S., which make up about half of what we sell. On the other are the operators who put them in the field. The work in between — ordering, inspecting, leasing, repositioning, surveying — is what we do. Inventory is nationwide and curated regionally by local sales managers in the cities they cover.
The trade has turned around since the company began. One Way Lease started out buying surplus containers in New York, Chicago and Houston and selling them to buyers in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Today Asia is the supply point, and the U.S. and Canada are where most containers are delivered and sold. The company moved with the market, and it still works with buyers well beyond North America — today most actively in the Caribbean.
Innovation in this business is rarely loud. It’s a tighter one-way leasing process, a faster turn from factory to depot, an inventory feed your buyer can verify before a unit is on a truck.
OWLU®, ANYU, LSEU.
One Way Lease, Inc. owns three BIC owner prefixes, all verifiable in the Bureau International des Containers public registry. OWLU® is our primary mark and the one federally registered as a U.S. trademark.
The four-letter owner prefix on most of our fleet and the only one of our three that is also a federally registered U.S. trademark.
A second BIC owner prefix registered to One Way Lease, Inc. Same public-registry verification standing as OWLU®.
A third BIC owner prefix registered to One Way Lease, Inc. Same public-registry verification standing as OWLU®.
All three are listed in the Bureau International des Containers public registry. Container number anatomy and how BIC codes work in the BIC codes guide.
Four principles.
Own the containers.
We own three BIC owner prefixes — OWLU®, ANYU, and LSEU — registered to One Way Lease, Inc. OWLU® is also our federally registered U.S. trademark. The containers we sell or lease are units we own or hold under contract, verifiable in the BIC public registry and listed live by depot, type, color, and grade.
Specs over slogans.
Every unit is keyed to its ISO 6346 type code, condition grade, exterior color, and depot location. If a detail matters to your operation, ask. You get the spec back — not a sales pitch.
Factory direct.
For new builds we work with the factories. Lead times and minimum order quantities are real, and we tell you both before a deposit. Custom options include doors, windows, vents, branding, paint to RAL, and IICL survey.
Reachable.
U.S.-based sales support across four time zones. Local sales managers in the regions they cover. NPSA Associate Member since 2005 — operators talking to operators.
Operators talking to operators since 1994.