After less than two years, storage by-the-box startup Remote Garage is no more.
“Ultimately we failed because our solution wasn’t the right one to make self-storage more convenient, or ‘on-demand’,” founder Jaako Piipponen wrote recently in a blog post on Medium.com. “I wanted to think we failed because of ‘The Market’, but we didn’t.”
Piipponen launched the company during the summer of 2014, partnering with a document storage facility in San Antonio to offer home pick up and delivery of small bins of personal items. A proliferation of similarly modeled companies has taken flight in cities across the country in recent years.
Jaakko Piipponen launched Remote Garage in 2014.
We’re gonna need a bigger box
In his post, Piipponen highlights a major factor in the demise of his startup: potential customers needed more storage space than what could fit neatly in a box.
“Soon after launch we started to get requests for storing larger items such as couches and beds, and there was not much we could do to help,” Piipponen said.
Piipponen built his business model around storing in document storage warehouses, which aren’t built to store larger items that customers wanted to store. Piipponen said the companies most likely to succeed in the full-service storage space will be those that are vertically integrated with their own storage warehouses,.
