LET US assume you’re moving out of the city for a couple of months, or your building is undergoing renovation. You’ve been deputed by your company on an international assignment and you have belongings that you cannot carry with you and, at the same time, you’re not in a position to dispose them of. Or, simply, you want to de-clutter your office or home space of seldom-used (but not useless) things. So what do you do?
This confusion has prompted all of us at some point of time or the other. Some, like the founders of start-ups such as BoxMySpace, StoreMore and BoxMe, have looked at it as an opportunity to identify a niche business proposition. What these companies basically do is to offer a simple and secure ‘on-demand’ storage solution to help you upkeep your stuff when you are not around.
Broadly, these companies offer you two options to avail of their services. You can either go for the high-quality plastic ‘boxes’ that the companies deliver to you to pack and store things like books, files, winter clothes, items of nostalgic value, so and so forth, and pick them up when you’re ready; or you can opt for ‘spaces’ where you can park larger items such as furnitures and other odd items that may not fit into those boxes.
While Mumbai-based BoxMySpace charges you anything between R66 and R99 per box per month, depending upon the length of storage, Bengaluru-based BoxMe also gives users a free insurance of R10,000 per box. Delhi-based StoreMore even has ‘vehicle storage’ plans, where you can choose a space depending upon the size of your car.
“The concept of ‘valet-storage’, in which service providers come and pick up items from users and move them to storage and then deliver them back when the users need them, has been picking up in the US and elsewhere in recent times. Companies like MakeSpace (New York), BoxBee (Boston) and BoxFul (Hong Kong) have been raising substantial amount of funds. Certain metrics that drive urban storage — consumerism, urban migration, soaring real-estate prices and space crunch — have been very much prevalent in Indian cities. Hence, there was a big value proposition in starting something that provides easy and secure, short- or long-term storage to consumers,” says Pratyush Jalan, founder of BoxMySpace.
BoxMySpace started off with a 1,000-sq-ft space, but has scaled that up to 12,000 sq ft at the moment. “Our primary model of storage is through our boxes, of which we currently have over 650 in our facility. Along with boxes, we also provide standardised units of storage space in units of 6x6x6 ft and 4x4x4 ft, which we started in late March. Our target audience is typically working professionals who are always on the move and home-makers looking to de-clutter their places,” says Jalan, an alumnus of Cornell University, US, and a former employee of Microsoft.
In July, BoxMySpace raised R1.92 crore from a consortium of investors led by Farooq Oomerbhoy, who was one of the co-founders of the early stage fund Orios Venture Partners. Ritesh Veera and Singapore Angel Networks also participated in the funding round.
On the other hand, StoreMore is co-promoted by the family office of the Burmans of Dabur. It is funded by Bedrock Ventures, a Noida-based venture capital firm. “The idea of storage is not new to India. We have traditionally used a friend’s empty flat, or our parent’s garage, or even our balconies for storage of things that aren’t used regularly. However, those solutions are neither available nor efficient,” says Pooja Kothari, co-founder and MD of StoreMore, adding: “Self-storage is an established industry abroad worth $25 billion in the US alone. In fact, in every country, from the UK and Australia to Singapore and now Hong Kong, self-storage is becoming worth multiple of billions of dollars. There is no reason why it shouldn’t become big in India.”
StoreMore has 10 facilities in its network spread across multiple locations in Delhi-NCR, which puts nearly 1 lakh sq ft of space under its management. “At any point in time, it has about 200-250 customers whose stuff is in storage with us,” adds Kothari, an alumnus of St Stephen’s College, New Delhi, and Delhi School of Economics.
However, with every new industry comes newer challenges. “The biggest challenge we faced was getting the customers to realise this option, more than the fact that it’s a niche industry. People are not aware of this solution and they do not know it yet whether they need such a service. Even if they do, they are not sure whether they can trust such a service. The situation is similar to that of e-commerce when it was in its nascent stage,” says Sriram Dandapani, co-founder and CEO of BoxMe, which currently works out of a 55,000-sq-ft ‘international-standard’ facility in Bengaluru “with the highest level of security”.