Redwood Logistics Makes Two Acquisitions in Six Days
In the span of six days, Redwood Logistics announced two acquisitions that together tell a single story: the Chicago-based fourth-party logistics provider is continuing to strengthen a platform that manages freight, customs compliance, and carrier relationships under one roof, at a moment when shippers are losing patience with the alternative.
On March 4, Redwood acquired EELCO, a Laredo, Texas-based customs brokerage and warehousing operation with more than 30 years of experience at the U.S.-Mexico border. Six days later, on March 10, the company announced the acquisition of Stridas, a Cincinnati-based managed transportation provider known for its optimization methodology and vertical depth in spirits and consumer packaged goods. Financial terms were not disclosed for either transaction.
“The freight market is at an inflection point. Shippers are tired of navigating rate volatility and fragmented providers. They now want a durable, integrated partner,” said Mark Yeager, CEO, Redwood Logistics.
EELCO was founded in 1991 by Eduardo Lozano, whose family has spent three decades building relationships at the busiest land port of entry in North America. The Laredo operation handles both northbound and southbound customs, operates a 250,000-square-foot warehouse opened in 2024 with 47 dock doors and more than 40,000 square feet designated for Foreign-Trade Zone warehousing, and logged more than 114,000 customs transactions in 2023.
For Redwood, the acquisition closes a gap. The company’s Mexico division had been managing more than 40,000 annual cross-border shipments through a network of 300-plus carrier partners, but customs brokerage had been handled through third-party relationships. As tariff complexity has escalated, driven by Section 232 duties, anti-dumping actions, UFLPA enforcement, and intensified HTS classification scrutiny, those outsourced arrangements became harder to defend to customers who wanted a single accountable partner.
Jordan Dewart, President of Redwood Mexico, put it directly: “Customs brokerage was on autopilot for a very long time. But tariffs forced companies to really understand their supply chains and who their customs broker is.”
The timing is deliberate. Nearshoring investment in Mexico has exceeded $100 billion over the past five years, reshaping freight flows along the entire I-35 corridor. Dewart noted that the cross-border market is tightening: equipment is getting scarce, rates are beginning to climb, and his team is more optimistic about Mexico freight volumes than it has been in two years. The EELCO warehouse, with its direct access to Interstate 35 and the World Trade Bridge, is positioned to absorb that volume with compliant, integrated handling from the moment freight crosses the border.
Eduardo Lozano will remain involved in the business post-acquisition. In his statement, he described the deal not as a sale but as an amplification: “Thirty years of port relationships, operational trust and licensed expertise do not disappear in an acquisition. It gets amplified.”
Where EELCO adds geography and compliance, Stridas adds methodology. The Cincinnati firm built its reputation on commercial solution design: re-engineering freight networks from the ground up, negotiating procurement across carrier relationships, and building long-term partnerships with enterprise shippers around measurable savings. Its vertical depth in spirits and consumer packaged goods gives Redwood a foothold in categories that demand precision handling and tight delivery performance.
Chris Painter, CEO of Stridas, framed the deal around scale. “We built Stridas for one reason: to change how our customers think about freight,” he said. “Working with Redwood, we can now do that at scale.”
Redwood’s Chief Operating Officer Steve Walton pointed to RedwoodConnect, the company’s proprietary integration platform, as the technology layer that makes the Stridas acquisition compound over time. “Redwood’s managed transportation business is built around using data and technology to make smarter decisions over time,” Walton said. “Stridas deepens that capability and connecting it to RedwoodConnect gives customers a managed transportation experience that compounds in value the longer we work together.”
Republic Partners served as exclusive financial advisor to Stridas in the transaction.
The acquisitions are complementary in a way that appears intentional. EELCO fills a geographic and compliance gap at the southern border, the most consequential trade gateway in North America as nearshoring accelerates and tariff volatility continues. Stridas fills a commercial and operational depth gap in managed transportation, adding the procurement leverage and solution design capability that enterprise shippers increasingly expect from a 4PL relationship.
Together, they feed into what Redwood describes as its core strategic posture: the RedwoodConnect platform unifies execution, technology, and strategic freight management under a single orchestrated solution.
For shippers watching the 4PL landscape evolve, the message from Redwood this week is hard to miss: integration is the product, and the pace of M&A suggests the company is not waiting for the market to validate that thesis before acting on it.
Redwood was recognized as a visionary in the inaugural 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Fourth-Party Logistics (4PL).
