The Storage.co.uk Award for Thinking Outside the Box

And the winners are:

• Kelly’s Self Storage
• Simply Store
• Safehouse
• Reading Self Storage
• Space Saver

Self storage is a pretty straightforward business. Customers bring their possessions to a self storage facility, put it into a locked unit, and pay the rent.

If the service is performed securely and efficiently, and matches the promises of the prospectus and contract, customers will be satisfied. Job done!

But self storage companies can do more than this – to extend the services they offer, to win even greater customer satisfaction, and to distinguish themselves from their competitors. However, to achieve this they may have to “think outside the box”.

The five winners of the Storage.co.uk Award for Thinking Outside the Box have done ‒ we believe ‒ precisely this, bringing a special verve to a new or innovative aspect of the industry that sets them apart.

Door to door storage

Quite a few self storage companies offer “mobile self storage” ‒ effectively a collection-and-delivery service. They collect customers’ possessions, store them, and then deliver them to where the customers want them at the end of the storage period.

Kelly’s Self Storage, at their four locations (Guildford, East London, St Albans and Haydock, near St Helens), have made this their core business model, with the slogan “We collect, we store, we deliver”.

Kelly’s Self Storage brings a container to the customer on a trailer ‒ and they claim to have been the first company in the UK to operate this system. Under their “You load. We collect” scheme, the customers themselves load the container, which is then taken back to the self storage facility and stored. (Kelly’s also offer a “We load. We collect” service.) This is still “self storage” in that customers can have free access to their possessions when in storage, at no extra charge ‒ but they do need to give 24-hours’ notice so their container can be extracted from the stacks.

Simply Store is another company offering mobile self storage, a concept that they have now rolled out to more than 30 member businesses in locations across the UK. The Simply Store website has a video film that demonstrates admirably how the mobile self storage system works, and the benefits that it can bring to self storage customers.

Really catering for customers

As reported in our blog entitled “Self Storage Offices”, an increasing number of the larger self storage companies are including offices-for-rent in their new-build facilities. This is the case also with Safehouse, in White Hart Lane, North London.

But Safehouse goes one step further, by offering an on-site café serving hot and cold drinks, sandwiches (plus paninis, ciabattas, bagels), salads, pasta dishes and snacks, for the benefit of their business users and self storage customers alike.

“Moving heavy stuff around is thirsty work,” declares the Safehouse website, “which is why any London business self storage company like Safehouse that values its customers, will have café facilities on site.” It’s actually much rarer that this statement would suggest: the Safehouse café may not be unique among self storage companies, but other examples are few and far between, and none match Safehouse for the prominence it gives to this facility.

Thinking big

Most self storage companies offer a range of storage units, typically somewhere between 10 square feet and 400 square feet. For Reading Self Storage, in the centre of Reading, 400 square feet is the smallest ‒ and its largest is 2414 square feet (with its own washroom and kitchen facility).

Clearly, these super-large units are not designed for your average household storage needs. By the same token, terms and conditions more closely correspond to commercial office lets, with a minimum six-month term.

The concept (few units, but all on a grand scale) pushes out the envelope of self storage, as the stylish and to-the-point website also indicates.

Store it… or sell it!

It’s not a big secret of the self storage industry that many people store possessions that they don’t actually need. Store the good stuff, by all means ‒ but self storage customers really shouldn’t be paying storage rent for stuff they’ll never use.

But it is hard to dispose of possessions that ‒ even if you don’t need them ‒ could be valuable.

Space Saver, near Faversham in Kent, have come up with a clever solution: their eBay Drop Zone: “Simply drop off any saleable articles with us and we will do the rest.”

Many storage customers would like to sell stuff, but are overcome by inertia, and the hassle of advertising, negotiating and despatching to buyers. Space Saver’s eBay Drop Zone will do it all for you. Of course there’s a fee, but customers will get cash from a successful sale ‒ and could also save on storage fees. Now, that really is thinking outside the box!

One Response to “The Storage.co.uk Award for Thinking Outside the Box”

1. storage wirral says:

   November 8, 2010 at 7:50 am

   It is very important to have an out of box thought process involved in a static business. Static means where one cannot maneuver the strategies a lot and the self storage business is one of them. Kudos to above mentioned award winners as they showed it is always possible to find your niche no matter how competitive the market is.