Uline, Inc.

Is Uline publicly traded?
No. Uline is privately held and has never listed shares. Its founders intend to keep it private.

Who owns Uline?
Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the husband-and-wife founders, own the company outright.

How much is Uline worth?
It does not disclose financials. Forbes estimates revenue near $8.1 billion for 2025 and the founders' combined net worth at roughly $11.8 billion.

Where is Uline headquartered?
Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, on a corporate campus opened in 2010.

Does Uline manufacture products?
Almost none. It is a distributor stocking more than 43,000 products from suppliers, including house-branded packaging items.

Why is Uline in the news?
Mainly for the Uihleins' political donations, among the largest to conservative causes in America, rather than for its business operations.

Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein founded Uline in 1980 in the basement of their Lake Forest, Illinois, home. Richard, an heir to the Schlitz brewing fortune through his father Edgar, had identified a gap: businesses needed shipping supplies in small quantities, quickly, and existing industrial distributors did not prioritize them. The first product was the H-101 carton sizer, a tool for resizing boxes.

Through the 1980s the couple built a mail-order catalog business around speed and assortment, adding warehouse after warehouse to extend next-day ground coverage. By the 1990s Uline had become the category leader, expanding into janitorial, retail, and material handling supplies while competitors remained regional or category-focused.

In 2010 the company relocated its headquarters from Waukegan, Illinois, to a new campus in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, a move supported by Wisconsin incentives and criticized in Illinois as a tax-driven defection. The campus anchored continued expansion: new distribution centers across the US plus Canadian and Mexican operations brought total warehouse space beyond 30 million square feet.

Growth stayed organic and acquisition-free, unusual in industrial distribution. The Uihleins rejected private equity approaches and maintained total ownership as the business scaled past an estimated $8 billion in revenue. In the 2020s the company's public profile has been shaped less by its operations than by the founders' political spending: Dick and Liz Uihlein rank among the largest donors to conservative candidates and causes in the country.

Uline discloses almost no sustainability data. Its catalog includes recycled-content, recyclable, and compostable product lines, and it has invested in energy-efficient warehouse construction, but it publishes no emissions targets, sustainability report, or ESG framework. Environmental claims remain at the product level.

On governance ethics, the company operates professionally but is inseparable from its owners' public profile, the main lens through which outsiders evaluate the enterprise.

Uline's scrutiny is dominated by the Uihleins' political spending. They rank among the top donors to Republican and conservative causes nationally, funding candidates, PACs, and organizations including groups that challenged the 2020 election result and opposed unionization. This has produced periodic boycott calls and media profiles questioning whether employee and customer funds support the politics.

Within the business, labor coverage has documented employee complaints about strict workplace rules and pace, routine OSHA citations at facilities, and the 2010 Illinois-to-Wisconsin move's incentive package. Uline does not discuss these publicly and faces no material outstanding sanction as of November 2026.