business
Who Owns Stanley? Two Companies, One Name
In brief
Who owns Stanley?
There are two Stanleys, and neither owns the other. The tumbler is made by Pacific Market International, LLC and PMI WW Brands LLC of Seattle, whose corporate parent is the privately held HAVI Group Limited Partnership of Chicago. The tools are made by Stanley Black & Decker, Inc., a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange as SWK, founded in New Britain, Connecticut in 1843. They are unrelated businesses that have shared the name for sixty years under a private contract.
That contract broke in 2025, went to federal court in Connecticut, and was settled out of it on 24 December 2025. The terms were never made public, but the change is visible on the drinkware company's own website.
First, the trophy: the Stanley Cup is not the Stanley cup
A large share of the people typing "who owns the Stanley Cup" want the hockey trophy, so let us clear it away before going further. The Stanley Cup is the National Hockey League's championship trophy, donated in 1892 by Sir Frederick Arthur Stanley, Lord Stanley of Preston, then Governor General of Canada, and first awarded in 1893 to the Montreal club. It has nothing whatever to do with either company in this article.
Its ownership is also stranger than most accounts allow. The trophy was never handed to a league. Lord Stanley vested it in trustees, and it has had trustees continuously ever since; the Hockey Hall of Fame lists Lanny McDonald and Gary Meagher as the current pair, both appointed in 2023. hhof.com Under a 1947 agreement the trustees delegated to the NHL the authority to set the conditions of competition, which is why the league runs it. Strictly, the NHL awards the Cup by arrangement with the trustees rather than owning it outright, and a winning club never owns it at all.
Everything below concerns the other Stanleys: the drinkware and the tools.
Who owns the tumbler: a Seattle brand inside a Chicago holding group
The 40-ounce Quencher that took over social media in 2023 and 2024 is sold as Stanley 1913. Behind it are Pacific Market International, LLC, founded in Seattle in 1983 by Rob Harris, and an affiliated entity, PMI WW Brands LLC. PMI did not invent the brand. It bought it, acquiring the Stanley and Aladdin vacuum-bottle businesses in 2002.
PMI itself is no longer independent. On 1 September 2021 it was acquired by HAVI, the privately held Chicago group best known as a supply-chain operator for McDonald's; terms were not disclosed. businesswire.com A press release is a weak source, so here is a stronger one. In the Connecticut litigation described below, PMI filed the disclosure statement that Rule 7.1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires of every corporate party, and named its parent as The HAVI Group Limited Partnership.
| Layer | Entity | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | Stanley 1913 | A trading name, not a company. The website footer reads "©PMI WW Brands, LLC". |
| Operating companies | Pacific Market International, LLC (Washington); PMI WW Brands LLC (Delaware) | Both at 2401 Elliott Avenue, Seattle. PMI WW Brands is the importer of record named in the 2024 CPSC recall. |
| Corporate parent | The HAVI Group Limited Partnership | Named as parent of both defendants in PMI's own Rule 7.1 disclosure, filed 8 July 2025. |
| Beneficial ownership | Not disclosed | HAVI is private. Its account of itself says the founding family transferred ownership in 2014 to its chief executive and four senior managers. No share split is published. |
Entity names, states of organisation and the Seattle address are taken from the complaint and docket in Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. v. Pacific Market International, LLC, No. 3:25-cv-00243 (D. Conn.). business.cch.com
The brand's 1913 origin story is genuine and checkable. On 5 August 1912 William Stanley Jr., the electrical engineer better known for commercial transformer design, filed a US patent application for a "heat-insulated receptacle" - a vacuum bottle whose insulating shell was steel rather than glass. It was granted on 2 September 1913 as US Patent 1,071,817. patents.google.com That is the "1913" in Stanley 1913, and William Stanley Jr. has no family or corporate connection to the Stanley of the tool company.
The line changed hands repeatedly after his death in 1916: to the New Britain hardware maker Landers, Frary & Clark in the 1920s, then in 1965 to Aladdin Industries of Nashville, and finally to PMI in 2002. The Quencher launched in 2016 and initially failed; it was revived through influencer marketing after Terence Reilly joined as president in 2020. Sales are widely reported to have risen from about $70m in 2019 to roughly $750m in 2023. cnbc.com PMI is private and publishes no accounts, so treat those as reported estimates.
The tumbler company is not a spin-off of the tool company. It is a hundred-year-old thermos business that happens to share a surname.
Who owns the tools: a public company, and you can read its register
The other Stanley is easier to research, because it has to tell you. Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. trades on the New York Stock Exchange as SWK. Its annual report states that it was founded in 1843 by Frederick T. Stanley, incorporated in Connecticut in 1852, and still keeps its principal executive office at 1000 Stanley Drive, New Britain. It reported 2025 revenues of $15.1bn and 155,079,468 shares outstanding as of 16 February 2026. sec.gov The Black & Decker half arrived by merger in March 2010, when The Stanley Works changed its name.
Because SWK is public, no one person controls it. The 2026 proxy statement lists every holder above five per cent as of 25 February 2026.
Stanley Black & Decker: holders above 5% (February 2026)
Percentages of common stock as reported in the company's 2026 definitive proxy statement, which draws them from Schedule 13G filings. "All other holders" is the residual and is not a named position. sec.gov
Note what these institutions are. Vanguard's 12 per cent is not a strategic stake; it is the arithmetic of index funds holding the whole market, which is why the proxy reports voting power and dispositive power separately and the two rarely match. Whoever owns Stanley Black & Decker economically, nobody owns it the way HAVI owns PMI.
How both can be true: the coexistence agreement
Trademark law does not award a word to one company forever. It protects a mark for particular goods, against uses likely to confuse buyers about who made what. A hand plane and a vacuum flask are not the same goods, and in 1913 nobody buying one would have thought of the other. Two unrelated Stanleys could coexist without either infringing.
Once the categories start drifting, that stops being automatic - so parties write it down. A trademark coexistence agreement is a private contract in which two owners of similar marks allocate the territory between them: who may use the word, on which goods, in which countries, and with what distinguishing matter attached. It settles a dispute in advance, and it binds only the signatories.
The trigger here was Aladdin's 1965 purchase of the Stanley bottle business. In July 1966, Stanley and Aladdin Industries Incorporated signed the first agreement, expressly "to avoid any confusion in the use of the trademark STANLEY". It confined STANLEY to "insulated containers adapted to keep their contents hot or cold", barred any extension to other goods, and required "Aladdin" to appear on goods, advertisements and literature bearing the mark. A 1990 amendment forced a pending application to be changed from STANLEY to ALADDIN-STANLEY. A fresh agreement in 2012 restated the deal for PMI.
Stanley the tool company
Legal owner: Stanley Black & Decker, Inc., a Connecticut corporation, NYSE: SWK.
Origin: Frederick T. Stanley's bolt and hardware works, New Britain, Connecticut, 1843.
Control: Dispersed. No holder above 12 per cent; index managers dominate the register.
Rights held: The senior US registrations, some dating to 1907, across tools, hardware, storage, clothing and more.
Stanley the drinkware brand
Legal owner: Pacific Market International, LLC and PMI WW Brands LLC, Seattle.
Origin: William Stanley Jr.'s steel vacuum bottle, patented 2 September 1913. No relation.
Control: Concentrated. The HAVI Group Limited Partnership, private, Chicago.
Rights held: Use of STANLEY on food and beverage containers and carrying cases, by contract.
What the 2012 agreement actually required
The 2012 document is not a licence - PMI has its own rights in the drinkware category - but it reads like one, because it is a list of things PMI agreed not to do. The complaint quotes the operative paragraphs, and they are unusually specific.
| Provision | What PMI agreed |
|---|---|
| Goods | Use STANLEY solely to promote and sell insulated and non-insulated food or beverage containers, and carrying cases for them. |
| Advertising | Display the full corporate name or "PMI" prominently, at least once on every page of advertising material. |
| Product marking | Show the PMI name next to STANLEY in a size ratio of at least 1:6 on each product and in each piece of advertising. |
| Company name | Not to use STANLEY as a company name, division or proper noun - the complaint's example is the phrase "At Stanley, we believe". |
| Domain name | Not to own or use a domain containing "Stanley" unless the PMI name is part of the domain and the site sells only containers. |
| Registration symbol | Not to use the ® symbol with STANLEY unless PMI holds a registration covering those goods. |
Quoted provisions as pleaded at paragraphs 24 to 27 of the complaint. The agreement itself is not public; these are the plaintiff's excerpts.
The 2025 lawsuit, and how it ended
On 17 February 2025, Stanley Black & Decker, Inc., Stanley Logistics, LLC and Black & Decker (U.S.) Inc. sued Pacific Market International, LLC and PMI WW Brands LLC in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, case number 3:25-cv-00243, assigned to Judge Sarah F. Russell. The complaint pleaded five counts: breach of contract, unfair competition and trademark infringement under the Lanham Act, and trademark infringement and unfair competition under Connecticut common law.
The theory was that success had made PMI stop complying. It had, the complaint said, rebranded itself as STANLEY or STANLEY 1913, adopted the domain stanley1913.com and matching email addresses, dropped "PMI" from point-of-sale material, and extended the mark to apparel - t-shirts, hats, sweatshirts - which sit outside the container category entirely. The pleading reproduced retail shelf photographs annotated "NO 'PMI' AT POINT OF SALE".
The reputational argument was sharper. In December 2024 the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of about 2.6 million travel mugs whose lids could detach, causing burns; 91 reports worldwide, 16 of them in the United States. The importer named in the notice was PMI WW Brands LLC, but the headline read "Stanley Recalls". cpsc.gov The marking obligations, Stanley argued, existed precisely so that could not happen. PMI's global president replied publicly that his company owns the Stanley brand in the food and beverage container category and would defend the claim.
It never got that far. PMI never filed an answer. Its deadline to respond was extended by joint motion roughly a dozen times through 2025, which is what negotiation looks like on a docket. On 19 December 2025 the parties filed a notice of settlement; on 23 December a stipulation of dismissal; and on 24 December 2025 Judge Russell ordered that "the claims in this action are dismissed with prejudice and without costs or attorney's fees", and closed the case.
"With prejudice" means Stanley Black & Decker cannot bring these claims again. The settlement terms were not filed and are not public. Whether money changed hands, whether the 2012 agreement was replaced, and what PMI may now put on a t-shirt are all unresolved on the public record.
What you can see from outside
One thing is observable without a docket. The banner at the top of every page of the drinkware company's website now reads "Welcome to Stanley 1913 | A Brand of PMI", its terms of service identify the contracting party as Pacific Market International, LLC, and the footer carries "©PMI WW Brands, LLC". stanley1913.com Those are, almost line for line, the attribution obligations the 2012 agreement imposed and the complaint said had been abandoned. The domain itself survived. That is inference rather than disclosure - but the marking came back, and the case closed.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Stanley cup the same as the Stanley Cup?
No. No relation. The Stanley Cup is the NHL championship trophy, donated by Lord Stanley of Preston in 1892, vested in trustees, awarded by the NHL under a 1947 delegation, and never the property of the winning team.
Does Stanley Black & Decker make Stanley cups?
No. It makes tools and hardware, has never made the tumbler, receives no royalty on it, and in 2025 sued the company that does.
Is Stanley 1913 a Chinese company?
No. Pacific Market International is a Washington company based in Seattle, and its parent is a Chicago partnership. Much of its manufacturing has been in Asia since 2002, but that is a supply chain, not ownership.
Who won the Stanley trademark lawsuit?
Neither side won in court. It settled and was dismissed with prejudice on 24 December 2025, before PMI ever filed an answer. The terms were not filed and remain confidential.
How can two companies use the same trademark?
Trademarks are protected for particular goods, not as property in a word. Where two owners' categories are far enough apart that buyers will not be confused, both can register and use the mark. Where they might drift, the owners sign a coexistence agreement allocating goods and markings, as these two did in 1966 and 2012.
Who founded the Stanley drinkware brand?
William Stanley Jr., an American electrical engineer granted US Patent 1,071,817 for a heat-insulated receptacle on 2 September 1913. He died in 1916; the business passed through Landers, Frary & Clark and Aladdin Industries before reaching PMI in 2002.
Key takeaways
The bottom line
- The tumbler is owned by Pacific Market International, LLC and PMI WW Brands LLC of Seattle, whose corporate parent is the private HAVI Group Limited Partnership of Chicago.
- The tools are owned by Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. (NYSE: SWK), founded in New Britain, Connecticut in 1843, with no holder above 12 per cent of its stock.
- Both names are legitimate. A coexistence agreement signed in July 1966 and rewritten in 2012 confined the drinkware side to food and beverage containers and required "PMI" alongside STANLEY.
- Stanley Black & Decker sued over that contract in February 2025 in the District of Connecticut, case 3:25-cv-00243. The case settled and was dismissed with prejudice on 24 December 2025; the terms are not public.
- The NHL's Stanley Cup is a third, unrelated thing: a challenge trophy held by trustees, awarded by the league, and owned by no team that ever lifts it.
Final word
For sixty years the two Stanleys were kept apart by a document almost nobody had read, and it held because neither name was worth enough to test it. Then a forty-ounce cup went viral, a boundary drawn for thermos flasks in 1966 was asked to carry apparel and a product recall, and the arrangement failed the way private arrangements usually do - quietly, and settled on terms the public will never see.