Leaving the city for a few months or years and wondering where to drop off your household items? Safe Storage, a startup providing storage space for people to keep their household goods and help businesses to store and manage their corporate documents will soon be entering the Chennai market. The startup has entered into a lease agreement for a 5,000 square feet space in Katupakkam. The firm intends to scale this space up to 50,000 sq. ft. in the next one year.
“Individuals want to save rent as they will be working from their hometown over the next few months. They temporarily want to park their household goods somewhere and that's where we come into the picture. They can leave all their things with us including vehicles for a particular fee and we will ensure that it is safe. People can store their household things when they want to renovate their house, they can store their extra items to free up their space or declutter,” said Nageswar Midam, co-founder of Safe Storage.
ADVERTISEMENT
Temporary storage
“There are small e-commerce companies looking for space without much strings attached to it as maintaining a warehouse would involve costs and so they don’t want to maintain big warehouses.
“There are small IT companies which are vacating their premises to reduce monthly maintenance and asking their employees to work from home.
ADVERTISEMENT
“There are other businesses like restaurants, playschools, etc., that are looking for temporary storage until the situation becomes better. We can provide storage space for all of them,” he added.
Mr. Midam said that construction work was on at the Katupakkam site until the lockdown came into place. “Once the lockdown is lifted we will wrap it up within two months and commence operations," he said. The firm has already done a study to evaluate its business potential in the Chennai market and claims that the response was good.
Explaining how the process works, Mr. Midam said, “We made the self-storage concept to suit the Indian customers where we will go to the customer's place, pack all their household items with packing materials like brown corrugated sheet, bubble wrap, wrapping film and carton boxes, transport these goods to our warehouse and stack them neatly on wooden pallets.
“As of now we are not providing separate rooms but we have plans to extend it in future. We are keeping all the items in a common warehouse next to each other with barcodes to distinctly identify the customer items.”
Currently, Safe Storage has 10 warehouses in Bengaluru and two in Hyderabad. “In the next five years, we would be expanding the business from the current 1 lakh sq ft to 5-10 lakh sq ft,” Mr. Midam said.