Free Up Some Space With Freshly-Funded NY Startup MakeSpace

Chances are that regardless of who you are or where you live, you have space issues. It’s 2014 and we all have a lot of stuff. Even as our lives become increasingly digital, we somehow manage to amass more ‘stuff’. And sometimes, you just don’t want to choose between a clutter-free apartment and keeping said stuff (even if it is junk).

The obvious solution is a storage unit, but in large cities, trips back and forth to a unit are often inconvenient, time-consuming and back-breaking. If you don’t own a car in the city, doubly so. That’s where MakeSpace comes in. The New York-based startup is out to solve your storage problems one bin at a time, and they just got some more funding to do it following the wrap-up of their $8M Series A round.

Here’s how it works: with the basic MakeSpace plan, you get four bins for $25/month. You fill those bins with the stuff that you want to hang onto (but don’t want hanging around) and arrange for the fine folks in the MakeSpace van to pick it up. From there, they’ll take your bins to their storage facility, take stock of your items (and take some photographs so you have a visual catalog) and stash it for you. At any time, you can give the people at MakeSpace a call and someone will fetch your belongings and bring them to you.

The idea is that your things are being stored in something like the cloud for physical stuff: it’s quick, it’s easy, it’s accessible and it’s on-demand. You really can’t beat a storage concept that picks your stuff up at the front door, brings it back whenever you want it, and doesn’t require any schleping in between. And if you’ve looked into storage units in Manhattan, you already know that $25/month is a fraction of the average cost of even the smallest units.

If you’ve got a real pack-rat problem, four totes probably aren’t going to solve all of your clutter woes. But, you can buy addition space for $6.25/mo per tote. It’s a pretty small price to pay for safe storage and some newfound space, which is always a hot commodity in apartments in the city.

The possibilities are endless, and chances are that as you look around, you’ll start seeing totes worth of junk that you can’t bring yourself to part with. Christmas decorations, sporting equipment, camping gear, etc. The possibilities are as boundless as our apparent love for collecting junk. But, as humans, we will likely continue collecting junk, so it’s a good thing that MakeSpace has found a way to save us from ourselves in a pretty painless way.

So what do you think? Is the convenience of cloud storage for your physical stuff enough to get you packing?