When you picture the infrastructure behind Britain’s startup economy, self-storage probably isn’t the first thing that springs to mind.
Coworking spaces, cloud software and laptops in coffee shops, perhaps. A lock-up full of boxes? Less likely.
But behind a growing number of small businesses is an altogether less glamorous task: somewhere to put everything.
Britain’s self-storage industry is now estimated to generate around £1.3 billion in annual turnover, while the amount of storage space available across the country has tripled since 2012.
And while plenty of that space is still occupied by the familiar contents of house moves, renovations and overflowing spare rooms, businesses have become an important part of the story.
Figures compiled by The Box Co. in its annual UK storage statistics roundup suggest 27% of storage renters now use the space for business purposes. Among business storage customers, 61% are businesses with just one to three members of staff.
In other words, there is a surprisingly large economy sitting somewhere between the kitchen table and the warehouse.
The Spare Bedroom Only Gets You So Far
Britain has always been a nation of small businesses. At the beginning of 2025, there were an estimated 5.7 million private-sector businesses in the UK, 5.64 million of which had fewer than 50 employees.
More strikingly, three-quarters had no employees beyond their owners. That matters because the physical shape of starting a business has changed.
A new company no longer necessarily begins with premises, employees and a sign above the door. A founder can build a website in an afternoon, sell through social media, take payments online and reach customers across the country without ever renting an office.
For service businesses, that can mean operating almost entirely from a laptop. Selling physical products is different.
The Instagram account might be digital, but 400 hoodies are not. Neither are boxes of skincare, candles, coffee, jewellery packaging, event equipment or the mountain of returns that inevitably accompanies an online retail business.
At some point, the physical world catches up. For many founders, that point arrives when the business starts eating the house.
The spare bedroom becomes a stockroom, the dining table becomes a packing station, the hallway fills with deliveries. Eventually, having more orders is simultaneously very good news for the company and very bad news for anyone attempting to live in the same building.
There is a Huge Gap Between a Garage and a Warehouse
The obvious next step might once have been commercial premises. But taking on a warehouse is a significant commitment for a young company whose stock requirements could look completely different in six months.
It isn’t just the rent. There can be business rates, utilities, insurance, maintenance and equipment to consider, alongside a lease that may last considerably longer than the founder’s reliable sales forecast.
This creates an awkward stage in the life of a product business. It is too big for the founder’s home, but not necessarily big enough to justify its own warehouse.
Self-storage fits rather neatly into that gap. The Box Co.’s figures suggest more than 680,000 UK businesses now use self-storage, with stock and inventory among the reasons businesses turn to it.
What sounds like a fairly mundane shift actually says something interesting about the way modern companies are being built.
Startups Have Become Very Good at Not Owning Things
For much of the past two decades, startup culture has been moving in one direction: away from fixed infrastructure.
Companies rent desks instead of signing long office leases. Software sits in the cloud rather than on company servers. Freelancers and agencies can replace entire in-house departments, at least in the early days.
Even the office market has had to respond. Flexible space accounted for around 10% of central London’s office market by 2025, up from 6% in 2019, as landlords increasingly moved towards shorter-term, fully managed spaces.
Storage is arguably the less fashionable version of the same idea.
For a small business, paying for the space it needs today can be considerably more attractive than paying for the space it hopes it might need two years from now.
It also makes experimentation easier. A founder testing a new product line does not necessarily know whether they will be ordering 100 units next time or 10,000. Black Friday might create a temporary mountain of stock. January might not.
The ability to expand and contract the physical footprint of a business therefore starts to look less like a storage decision and more like a financial one.
Online Businesses Still Need Somewhere Offline
The growth of e-commerce makes this particularly relevant.
In 2007, just 3.4% of British retail sales happened online. By 2019, the figure had reached 19.2%. Then came the pandemic.
Online’s share jumped to 28.1% in 2020 and 30.7% in 2021. It has since settled below that extraordinary peak, but the shift has hardly reversed: 27.4% of retail sales were still made online in 2025.
That has lowered the barrier to becoming a retailer enormously. You no longer need a shop to start a retail business. You need something people want to buy and a way of getting it in front of them.
What e-commerce hasn’t done is make the physical product disappear. Every online brand still has to solve the decidedly offline questions of where its stock goes, who packs it and how it reaches the customer.
For the biggest companies, the answer is sophisticated fulfilment networks and enormous distribution centres.
For a founder shipping their first few hundred orders, it might still be a stack of boxes ten feet from the sofa. The storage industry’s growing relationship with small businesses is, in part, what happens in between.
An Unlikely Barometer for Entrepreneurship
There are now around 2,915 self-storage sites and 64 million square feet of storage space across the UK, according to the Self Storage Association’s latest annual report. In 2024 alone, the industry’s turnover came in just shy of £1.2 billion.
More recent estimates put annual turnover at around £1.3 billion. Some of that growth can be explained by the way we live. Homes are smaller, people move more frequently and renters do not always have the luxury of lofts, garages and spare rooms.
But look behind the roller doors and another part of Britain’s economy is visible too.
Small retailers keeping stock. Tradespeople storing equipment. E-commerce founders surrounded by packaging. Businesses that have outgrown the kitchen table but aren’t quite ready for the keys to a warehouse.
None of it has quite the mythology of two founders building a billion-dollar company from a garage.
Then again, perhaps the garage was never the important part of that story. It was having somewhere cheap enough to start.
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