Simon Gibson

Simon spent decades in international freight before joining his son Oliver and Charlotte to start TradeWind. The last four of those years he ran customs and carrier operations for a UK third-party-logistics business whose biggest customer base was North America — which is to say, he spent four years arguing with US Customs and Border Protection about HS code classifications by email, often at one in the morning, on behalf of small UK sellers who hadn’t realised they needed someone in their corner.

If you’ve ever wondered who actually reads the rules of substantial transformation, fills out a CN23, or knows by heart which precise version of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule was in effect last quarter — that’s the work Simon’s spent his career on.

When EO 14324 dropped in August 2025, Simon’s reaction was the opposite of most sellers’. He’d been telling people for years that the $800 de minimis threshold was a structural anomaly and that US customs would catch up eventually. The work of TradeWind on the customs side, he says, is mostly about making the bureaucratic mess legible: pick the right HS code, declare the correct value, get the country of manufacture honest, and ship DDP. Do those four things and 99% of US-bound parcels clear in hours rather than days.

Simon writes the customs and carrier-mechanics articles on the TradeWind blog — HS codes, commercial invoices, what’s genuinely different between UPS Worldwide Economy and UPS Standard, the practical effect of each new CBP guidance note. He plays competitive chess at a moderate amateur level, collects vintage shipping atlases, and is unreasonably fond of correctly-printed labels.