In 2014 UHaul sued HireAHelper for trademark infringement, a suit that was settled out of court. The jury awarded PODS $62 million in damages. The jury found that U-Haul unjustly profited from mentioning the term on its marketing and advertising materials and began using the word only after PODS became famous as a brand name in the industry. On September 25, 2014, a jury ruled that U-Haul had infringed on PODS' trademarks, causing confusion and damaging business for PODS. District Court for trademark infringement, claiming that U-Haul "improperly and unlawfully" used the word "pods" to describe its U-Box product.
In 2012, another moving and storage company, PODS, sued U-Haul in U.S. The filing did not include or affect U-Haul operations. AMERCO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2003 and emerged in March 2004. The Shoen family, currently led by chairman and president Edward "Joe" Shoen, owns about 40% of the company through their AMERCO holding company. In 1999, 83-year-old Leonard Shoen suffered fatal injuries when he crashed into a telephone pole near his Las Vegas, Nevada, home it was later ruled a suicide. The takeover sparked a major family dispute that led to a $461 million judgment in favor of Leonard Shoen and others. Family squabbling over the U-Haul empire turned to physical confrontations between some of his children at company meetings, even before the 1986 takeover, and accusations of murder for hire when the wife of a family member loyal to Sam was murdered in the family home (the culprit was later found and stated it was a robbery gone wrong however, Sam continued to accuse Joe and Mark of being behind the murder). Shoen transferred all but 2% of control to his children when two of them, Edward and Mark, launched a successful takeover of the business in 1986. Distracted to some extent by growing his business, Shoen took time for multiple marriages (after the death of Anna Mary at an early age due to a congenital heart defect) and eventually had a total of 12 (some sources say 13) children, each of whom he made stockholders. He developed one-way rentals and enlisted investors as partners in each trailer as methods of growth.īy 1955, there were more than 10,000 U-Haul trailers on the road, and the brand was nationally known. He began building rental trailers and splitting the fees for their use with gas station owners whom he franchised as agents. In 1945, at the age of 29, Leonard Shoen co-founded U-Haul with his wife, Anna Mary Carty, in the town of Ridgefield, Washington, with an investment of $5,000. The livery used on rented vehicles is widely recognized, primarily consisting of white and a thick horizontal orange stripe, in addition to a large state- or province-themed picture, known as SuperGraphics. U-Haul rents trucks, trailers, and other pieces of equipment, but many U-Haul centers and dealerships also provide self storage units, moving boxes and associated packing supplies, moving assistance, LPG (propane) refueling, and hitch and trailer wiring installation, among other services.īecause of the company's ubiquity (there are over 17,000 active dealers across the country) the name is sometimes used as a genericized trademark to refer to the services of any self-move rental company. The Shoen family (heirs of founder Sam Shoen) currently owns, both directly and indirectly, about 55 percent of AMERCO.
U-Haul is owned by U-Haul Holding Company, which in turn is owned by AMERCO, a publicly traded holding company which also operates: The company was founded by Leonard Shoen and Anna Mary Carty in Ridgefield, Washington, who began it in a garage owned by Carty's family, and expanded it through franchising with gas stations. U-Haul is an American moving truck, trailer, and self-storage rental company, based in Phoenix, Arizona, that has been in operation since 1945.
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