Who Actually Makes HexClad? A Supply-Chain Teardown from Public Customs Data

Teardown of HexClad (One Source To Market LLC) · Published August 23, 2026

Every ocean container that enters the United States leaves a paper trail. Before a ship docks, its carrier files a bill of lading with U.S. Customs and Border Protection naming the shipper, the consignee, the ports, and a description of the cargo — and for vessel-borne freight, those manifests are public record under 19 CFR §103.31. Free aggregators (ImportInfo, ImportKey, Panjiva’s public profiles, PortExaminer) have indexed billions of them.

This teardown is what that public trail reveals about HexClad, the Gordon Ramsay–backed cookware brand. No inside sources, no paid data, no interviews — just the manifest record, cross-validated across independent indexes, with every figure traceable to a source and every estimate labeled as one.

Executive summary

• HexClad (legal entity One Source To Market LLC, Los Angeles) imports essentially 100% of its product by ocean container from China; every one of the 42 unique most-recent bills of lading (arrivals Aug 21–23, 2026) moved Yantian (Shenzhen) → Long Beach / Los Angeles.
• One supplier dominates: Black Cube Co., Ltd. (Siheung, S. Korea) is shipper-of-record on 51–53% of all brand-marked import volume in every year since 2022 — and Black Cube invented the hybrid technology (2007) and owns a competing brand (Cookcell). Panjiva shows it has only ~4 U.S. customers: the dependency runs both ways.
• Volume trend: brand-marked BOL records grew 2 (2016) → 2,066 (2023 peak) → dipped 17% to 1,708 (2024) → recovered to 2,077 (2025); 2026 is up +22% YoY through Aug 24 (1,783 vs 1,456).
• ~1/3 of volume is partially de-identified: 32% of records are consigned to forwarder TK Freight Inc. rather than to HexClad — opacity anyone reading the brand’s supplier story should understand.
• Tariff exposure is the biggest lever: cookware of Chinese origin (HS 7323.93, confirmed on HexClad BOLs) carries a ~37% duty burden in 2026. No diversification out of China is visible in the manifest record.
• The picture in one line: a $550M-revenue business (press-reported) resting on one supplier relationship, one origin country, and one port lane.

1. The entities behind the brand

Free data coverage proved rich: two independent free customs-data aggregators (ImportInfo, ImportKey) returned thousands of records, and aggregates cross-validated against Panjiva’s public profile within 1%. Coverage detail and known gaps are in §7 (Data Confidence).

Entity mapping (verified from bills of lading):

2. Supplier map

Verified from manifest records; “shipments” are document-level BOL records unless noted. Free tiers do not expose complete per-pair volumes (see §7), so shares are given only where a verified numerator and denominator exist.

Reading the map: the physical factories behind Black Cube and Sky G are not named on the bills of lading — marks only say “MADE IN P.R.C.” Black Cube is a Korean technology/exporter company; production occurs in mainland China and ships from Shenzhen. The named Chinese suppliers (Nanjing Terren, Dongguan Vtop, Jiangmen Yuze, Guangzhou DTYT) cover adjacent categories (utensils, silicone, bowls, knives), not the core hybrid pan line.

3. Shipment activity

3.1 Volume over time (verified)

BOL records matching “hexclad” in any field, by arrival year (data; ImportInfo public counter, document-level):

Year-to-date through Aug 24 (apples-to-apples): 2024: 848 → 2025: 1,456 (+72%) → 2026: 1,783 (+22%).

Company-level pre-brand history (consignee = One Source To Market, any cargo): 2013: 0 · 2014: 1 · 2015: 4 — consistent with the press narrative of a 2013 corporate start, 2015–16 product development, and a 2016–17 commercial launch.

Cross-validation: ImportKey’s independent index shows 2,504 shipment-level records and 32.9M kg cumulative weight for the same keyword; Panjiva’s public Black Cube profile (5,054 shipments) matches ImportInfo’s Black Cube count (5,090) within 0.7%.

3.2 Physical scale — estimate

ImportInfo counts documents (a house bill + master bill for one container = 2 records); ImportKey’s shipment-level count implies ~3.9 documents per physical shipment. Applying that ratio to 2025’s 2,077 records ⇒ ≈ 500–550 physical ocean shipments in 2025, and at the observed 2 TEU per BOL ⇒ ≈ 1,000–1,100 TEU in 2025. Plausibility check: at ~$550M self-reported annual revenue, that is ~$1M of retail revenue per container — plausible for premium cookware sets retailing at $99–$900.

3.3 Port routing (verified, recent sample)

Across the two most-recent samples (ImportInfo’s 25 visible rows + ImportKey’s 10 latest rows; 42 unique bills of lading after de-duplicating overlapping master/house bills): 100% loaded at Yantian (Shenzhen), China; 39 discharged at Long Beach, 3 at Los Angeles. Typical BOL: 2 TEU (all 10 records with TEU data), 3.3–22.9 t gross, ~400–2,200 cartons. Carriers observed: OOCL (OOLU-prefixed master bills), COSCO (COSU-prefixed); vessels incl. OOCL Bauhinia, Ever Mode, Xin Fei Zhou.

Historical shift: the earliest brand-marked records (Dec 2017–Feb 2018) show a different pattern — “skillet & open wok & lid” sets arriving via Hong Kong and one via Kaohsiung (Taiwan), consigned either to One Source To Market directly or to T.K. Freight. By 2019+ the flow consolidated to Yantian direct. Routing has since been single-lane.

3.4 Seasonality (verified, 2025)

Arrivals peak in Jul–Sep (holiday inventory build) and drop sharply in Q4 — classic retail seasonality. Q4’s low arrival count means holiday stock is already stateside by October; any supply disruption in Q2–Q3 is the one that hurts.

3.5 Product-mix signals (verified from cargo descriptions)

Core: hybrid pans, pot/pan sets, woks, stock pots. Visible line extensions in the record: pizza steel sets (120 records), kitchen knife sets (109 records), mixing bowl sets, griddle tool sets, oven mitts, tamagoyaki pans, roasting pans. The category extensions ride the same Shenzhen→LA lane and (for bowls/knives/utensils) use separate Chinese specialty suppliers — i.e., diversification of suppliers is happening at the category edges, not in the core pan line.

4. Supply-chain risk flags

1. Single-source dependency on the technology inventor. ~51–53% of all import volume, every year since 2022, ships under one exporter: Black Cube — the company that invented the hybrid surface (2007), owns the patents/know-how, and operates its own competing cookware brand (Cookcell). Panjiva shows ~4 total U.S. customers for Black Cube, so HexClad is likewise its anchor client. This is a bilateral dependency with a conflict of interest embedded in it. Verified records + cited company statements; the contractual terms are unknown.
2. 100% China-origin, single-port loading. Everything observed in 2026 loads at Yantian and lands in LA/Long Beach. No Vietnam/other-origin diversification appears anywhere in the manifest record. Verified for ocean freight; air freight is invisible to this data.
3. Tariff exposure. HexClad’s core line classifies under HS 7323.93 (confirmed on a 2018 BOL) — Chinese-origin stainless kitchenware faces ~25% Section 301 + ~10% 2025-era IEEPA layers + ~2% MFN ≈ 37–38% total duty burden per 2026 industry sourcing guides. At $550M revenue and typical D2C cookware COGS, that is an eight-figure annual duty bill — labeled estimate; the duty rates are cited, the dollar figure is our arithmetic, not the company’s actual entry summaries.
4. Opacity by design (partial). 32% of brand-marked volume (805 of 2,492 records) is consigned to TK Freight Inc. rather than to HexClad; additional volume may be fully de-identified (“to order” bills) and invisible to keyword search entirely. The manifest record therefore understates total volume and hides some factories.
5. 3PL concentration. One customs/logistics channel (TK Freight, Walnut CA) plus one HK consolidator (Sky G) handle roughly a third of inbound volume.
6. Compliance overhang (adjacent risk). HexClad paid a $2.5M settlement (Cliburn v. One Source to Market, 2025) over “non-toxic” advertising claims; the product is now marketed as PFAS-free “TerraBond” ceramic. Coating chemistry originates in the Chinese supply chain — certification integrity is an open question the manifest record cannot answer.

5. Competitive context — inference, labeled

• Margin structure (inference): FCL ocean freight is a negligible cost line for this brand — at ~12 t and ~1,600 cartons per BOL and sub-$5k container rates, freight is likely <2% of retail value. The cost stack that matters is product COGS + duties. Premium pricing ($99–$900 sets) over Chinese factory costs implies D2C-typical 60–70% gross margins, of which tariffs now take a growing bite. A 25-point Section 301 duty on the core line is roughly a 6–8-point gross-margin headwind if COGS is ~25–30% of retail — estimate, not company actuals.
• Scale read (inference): ~500+ containers/yr and ~$1M retail revenue per container puts HexClad well beyond D2C peers’ typical import footprint and explains why the brand, not the factory, holds the pricing power — except on the hybrid pan, where Black Cube holds it.
• Moat asymmetry (inference): the brand’s moat (Ramsay/Fox media engine, $100M Studio Ramsay Global minority investment of July 2024) sits in marketing; the product moat (laser-etched hybrid surface) sits with the supplier. An acquirer buys the former and rents the latter — unless the Black Cube contract says otherwise.
• Channel note (verified press): Costco is the only wholesale account; international expansion began ~2022 with a 25–30%-of-revenue goal. The Canadian consignee entities in the manifest record (One Source To Market, Etobicoke; Flexport Canada, 39+ records) corroborate the international build-out in customs data.

6. Questions the manifest record raises

1. What factories physically produce the hybrid line, and what % of COGS does Black Cube represent? (BOLs name the exporter, not the plants.)
2. What does the Black Cube agreement say on IP ownership, exclusivity, non-compete, and price adjustment? What stops the supplier’s own brand (Cookcell) or a fourth U.S. customer from undercutting HexClad?
3. Is there a tariff mitigation plan — first-sale valuation, bonded/FTZ, dual-sourcing qualification outside China — and what is the actual annual duty paid?
4. Why did import volume dip 17% in 2024 while reported revenue kept growing — destocking, price/mix shift, or Costco timing?
5. How much volume is fully de-identified beyond the forwarder-consigned 32%?
6. What share of arrivals is Costco roadshow inventory vs. D2C replenishment, and how does that concentrate Q2–Q3 supply risk (the pre-holiday arrival peak)?
7. What is the air-freight share of inbound units (invisible in ocean BOL data), and its margin impact during disruptions?
8. Post-Cliburn, who audits PFAS-free/coating chemistry certifications at the Chinese plants, and how often?

7. Data confidence

What “covered” means here. Two universes were measured: (a) brand-marked records — BOLs containing the string “hexclad” anywhere (9,836 documents, 2016–2026-08-24, ImportInfo; 2,504 shipment-level records / 32.9M kg, ImportKey); (b) company-consignee records — BOLs consigned to “One Source To Market” regardless of cargo marking (5,439 documents, ImportInfo). Both are ocean freight only.

Verified vs. incomplete.

Counter semantics. ImportInfo counts BOL documents (house + master bills separately); ImportKey counts shipments (~50% lower on identical scopes — house/master de-duplication); Panjiva’s document-level Black Cube count matches ImportInfo within 0.7%. Physical shipment estimates (§3.2) are labeled estimates with the method shown.

Sources that failed or were unusable (noted, not bypassed): ImportYeti — Cloudflare bot protection on all fetches, no Wayback snapshots of the HexClad page; Volza — Cloudflare block; PortExaminer — coverage of this company effectively ends pre-2020; Tradesparq/52wmb/usacustomsdata — login-required or unreachable; ImportInfo CSV export and directory search require a (free) account — not used here; ImportKey anonymous daily query cap reached mid-pull. ImportYeti in particular is normally the richest free source and is the first upgrade in a paid sprint (along with Panjiva/ImportGenius subscriptions and a registered ImportInfo account).

Bottom line on confidence: high confidence in who (entities, suppliers, routing), when (trend shape, seasonality), and relative shares; moderate confidence in absolute physical counts (document/shipment duplication); no visibility into air freight, duty dollars, or de-identified volume. Nothing in this teardown is estimated without being labeled as such.

8. Methodology & sources

Method. (1) Mapped the target’s legal entities and addresses from BOL records and court captions. (2) Pulled aggregate counters and record samples from ImportInfo’s public bill-of-lading search (general query hexclad; filtered queries by arrival date, shipper, consignee, commodity) — no login; CSV export is account-gated and was not used. (3) Cross-validated with ImportKey’s public search API (the unauthenticated endpoint its own public homepage calls) for shipment-level counts, total weight, and consignee/supplier aggregations. (4) Cross-validated the key supplier against Panjiva’s public profile and the supplier’s own listing on a Korean government trade portal. (5) Added founding-era color from PortExaminer’s free archive. (6) Company context from primary/press sources listed below. All access dates: 2026-08-24. Raw extracts: data/ with per-file provenance.

Customs-data sources (free/public):

• ImportInfo public BOL search — e.g. query “hexclad” (9,836 records); per-year and filtered URLs are embedded in data/importinfo_yearly_counts.csv and data/aggregate_counts.csv
• ImportKey public search API (api.importkey.com/api/{shipment,buyer,supplier}/public/search), queries: hexclad, black cube, one source to market, tk freight, t k freight — raw JSON in data/
• Panjiva public profile: Black Cube Co., Ltd. — 5,054 U.S. shipments; ~4 customers; top products pan/wok/pot/dutch oven/glass
• PortExaminer: Coway → One Source To Market, BOL EXDO6430264734 — 2015-07-15, recipe books

Company & supplier context:

• Shopify: “HexClad: Danny Winer’s Cookware Success Story” (2025-07-08) — >$550M annual revenue; Korean-inventor origin story
• Modern Retail podcast write-up (2023-12-14) — 2023 revenue >$350M; Costco sole wholesale; international push from ~2022; Ramsay part-owner
• The National (2024-07-22) — $100M Studio Ramsay Global (Fox+Ramsay) minority investment; >$1B valuation; Ramsay personal stake since 2021
• gobizkorea: BLACKCUBE CO.,LTD — “We developed original technology in 2007”; hexagonal hybrid cookware; owns Cookcell brand
• HexClad.com — product lines, PFAS-free TerraBond positioning, price points ($99–$900)
• ClassAction.org (2025-06-16) and settlement site — $2.5M Cliburn settlement
• SignalHire profile: Daniel Winer — CEO of One Source to Market since Feb 2013 (LinkedIn-derived)
• Tariff context: Korea Industry Insights (2026-07-07) and ufamcooks duty guide (2026-06) — Section 301 List 3 (25%, HTS 7323.93 via 9903.88.03/.04) + ~10% IEEPA + 2% MFN ≈ 37–38% total burden on China-origin stainless cookware

Self-reported vs. verified. Revenue, valuation, and investment figures are company/press-reported (labeled as such above). All shipment counts, dates, ports, entities, and product descriptions are from customs records retrieved on the access date. Inferences are confined to §5 and labeled.