A moving experience
CLEARWATER, Fla. — Pete Warhurst had built one self-storage business and was looking for a place to put another in densely populated Pinellas County where good highway frontage was already scarce.
That’s when the firefighter-turned-businessman started thinking: What if he could take the storage containers right to the customer?
“We sort of poked around to see if anyone was doing it and there wasn’t,” said Warhurst, a former Largo, Fla., firefighter. “No one was targeting the residential market. We figured we could build 50 or 100 boxes and bring them to people’s houses, and we’ll have an adjunct to fixed-based storage.”
It was 1998, and the idea for PODS — Portable On Demand Storage — was born. Warhurst now runs a company that did $200 million in gross revenue last year and whose name has become a generic descriptor for mobile container storage like Kleenex is for facial tissues and Xerox for photocopies.
Still privately owned, PODS is now franchised in 45 states, logs 2,500 pickups and deliveries a day and has grown into the 800-pound gorilla in a growing segment of the moving and storage market. Franchises will open soon in Canada and Australia.
The concept is simple. PODS brings an 8-by-12 or 8-by-16-foot container to your house and leaves it. You pack it at your own pace and lock it up, then the truck takes it to your new house or to a warehouse for storage. It costs more than renting a truck and moving yourself, but it’s cheaper than hiring a full-service mover.
“The average consumer has been forced for the last 100 years to either pay a full-service mover or drop down to a U-Haul environment and do it themselves,” Warhurst said. “We think that majority of the U.S. population in the 30-to-60-year-old bracket prefer our model.”
The units are constructed of heavy plywood over steel frames and can withstand 110-mph winds. A specially engineered hydraulic lift system allows customers to pack each one with more than three tons of stuff.
Janette Berrios didn’t have three tons’ worth, but she rented a PODS unit for her move to another house within her neighborhood near Tampa.
“They bring the pod right to your house,” said Berrios, 24. “We had the convenience of doing it ourselves and having the security that our stuff was going to be packed well, and it wasn’t going to be misplaced.”
Mark Gee, who lives in the Tampa suburb of Brandon, needed someplace to put the contents of his garage while it was being painted recently. He’d seen PODS units around and rented one for about a week to keep his things out of the weather.
“It just made sense,” said the 42-year-old Gee, who works for a wholesale roofing supply company.