It was exactly 11 years ago when Daniel Hughes, CEO of Storage by Mail, conceptualized the idea. He had just finished is undergraduate work and moved to a small apartment on the upper east side of New York City. “My apartment was 400 square feet and they advertised it as a one bedroom…it was the tiniest apartment you could imagine. I actually think 400 square feet was being generous. It didn’t have a single closet, so I had to get creative like hanging my bicycle from the ceiling,” Hughes describes. Knowing that he needed to find some extra space Hughes did what most people do, which is jump online and find the nearest storage facility.
He went over to the nearest facility and had a series of miserable experiences: “The first thing that I experienced when I walked in there and I had seen this ad for a $29 personal closet, and I thought this would be perfect for me! I asked about that one, and they explained to me that they had just rented the last one, so perhaps I would like to have the next size up? I felt like no matter what size I asked for they would have done that to me. Also, even though the facility distance wise wasn’t that far from me, because I didn’t own a car it was going to be really problematic moving in and out of the facility,” said Hughes.
The third problem I had was that my company at the time was planning on moving me temporarily to San Francisco.” The assignment was about 6-months but had the chance of becoming permanent, so Hughes wasn’t really sure when or if he was coming back. Thus it was going to be really hard for him to access his stuff from New York while living on the West Coast. Hughes explains, “At the time I was already a Netflix customer so I had already outsourced the storage of my DVD collection. I was as enamored by how they used the prepaid shipping labels to move DVDs back and forth. So I thought, maybe customers could use the same shipping label process to send boxes back and forth to a remote warehouse.”
How it Works?
To setup the service you choose a subscription plans or you can pay as you go. So let’s say you opt in for the $49 per month plan, which allows you store up to 10 boxes any size with free round trip door to door shipping. “One of the reasons we can say any size is that there is a natural limiting factor in that the Post Office will only a box up to 70 pounds and up to a certain size. You can’t ship your refrigerator for example or your car,” jokes Hughes. Once you open your account you have a personalized inventory page, and you create a record of each box that you would like to put into storage. 
You can describe in text the contents of the box, take a picture and sync those with the description, so you know exactly what’s in each box. Storage by Mail also allows you to sync a Word Doc, Excel spreadsheet, or any other type of electronic file. You then select to “Print Label” and it generates a prepaid, barcoded-shipping label with delivery confirmation already printed on it.
The final step is just to get your stuff in the mail. One thing that not very many people know is that aside from their normal carrier routes, you can actually schedule a pickup at a certain time with U.S. Postal Service. “We’ve begun to proactively schedule those appointments for customers, because they don’t realize that the option is even available to them! It’s a real convenience to know that the mail man can come with a truck at 4:00PM on Wednesday afternoon, and you just sit there and give them your stuff,” explains Hughes.
Although the Storage by Mail service is useful for any person on the go looking for more storage space, Hughes was surprised to find that it was particularly an enticing service for military personnel over seas. Hughes describes, “I got an email a long time ago from a guy working for Kellogg, Brown and Root who was serving and living in Kuwait. He was originally from New York, and during that time he was having his mother ship his stuff back and forth. KBR was then going to move him to Bahgdad, so he had a problem about what to do with all his stuff. He didn’t want to send it to his mother’s house making it her problem and there was no storage facility in the U.S. that would receive storage boxes through the mail. He sent an email telling me he’d found a U.S. Post Office on a nearby military base in Kuwait and asked if our shipping labels would work there. After some research, sure enough we found out they would! He started sending us a ton of boxes and referring our services to other people in the military who were searching for a similar solution.” Via word of mouth from solving that one guy’s problem their service has become pretty popular with military service men and women!
Last month Storage by Mail was selected as one of the $50,000 winners in the Mass Challenge. Hughes describes the experience as, “one of the best things he’s ever done.” The experience really opened Hughs’s eyes about how rich the entrepreneurial community is in Boston. “There were so many people who reached out to us proactively to say, ‘hey I think you should meet this guy or I just had an idea about your business I thought I would share it with you.’ Being from New York I don’t experience that quite as much, so it’s been great. John Harthorne and Akil Nigam [co-founders of Mass Challenge] are phenomenal. They’re always sending me emails saying, ‘I think you should connect with this person’ and it seems like every week I’m meeting someone new from Mass Challenge.”
Moving forward Storage by Mail will be adding Fedex to their services. They plan to add a warehouse space in Memphis, Tennessee right where the Fedex hub is. This will the company to get low cost shipping and improve rates for customers.
