Clearwater storage company Pods names Kathryn Marinello new president, CEO
Clearwater portable storage and moving company Pods has picked a new leader.
Kathryn Marinello has been named Pods new president and CEO, the company announced Tuesday. She arrives from Hertz Global Holdings, owner of the Hertz, Dollar and Thrifty rental car brands, where she held the same titles.
“When Pods introduced its portable on-demand storage solutions, it changed the way the world thinks about moving and storage,” she said in a statement. “That longtime commitment to meeting our customers’ unique, personal needs is fundamental to who we are as a company, and it is what excites me most about the opportunities ahead of us.”
Marinello was at Hertz for three years before resigning last May, shortly before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Before that, the company had shed 16,000 jobs, a quarter of its workforce, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
In addition to Hertz, Marinello has held leadership roles at General Electric, Citibank, Barclays and Ceridian Corporation. She was also a senior advisor for investment management company Ares Management LLC, and has served on the boards of companies such as MasterCard and General Motors.
In 2018, Marinello came in at No. 50 on Fortune’s list of the most powerful women in business — one spot ahead of Oprah Winfrey.
Founded in Clearwater in 1998, Pods has 227,000 containers in service in 46 states and several countries, and has completed more than 1.2 million long-distance moves and 5.4 million deliveries.
The company sold for more than $450 million in 2008 to an investment firm that later went bankrupt. In 2015, it sold for more than $1 billion to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, a group representing 329,000 current and former teachers in Canada. Its holdings include an array of companies in fields ranging from energy and shipping services to food and toy products.
