Preparing for Seasonal Storage for Your Business
In retail, you’re always living in the future. While others are enjoying the changing leaves and abundance of pumpkin spice everything, you’re thinking about the upcoming holiday season. For many retail businesses, the holiday season comprises the bulk of their sales—and with so much riding on a three-month period, getting your inventory orders right is crucial.
While we can’t really offer any help with predicting your customers’ product demands, we can help you meet all of your seasonal business storage needs.
What Is Seasonal Storage?
Seasonal storage is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: storage that meets your seasonal demands. For retail locations, this could mean providing extra space during the holiday season to store excess inventory and other items. Or, if you’re running a construction outfit, perhaps you’re providing extra storage space during the spring and summer months when renovation projects swing into action.
While everyone’s seasonal needs are unique, seasonal storage is there to help you fill storage gaps that pop up seasonally as work demands change and grow.
Portable Storage: Your New Seasonal Secret Weapon
Few things are worse than a cramped sales floor or an overflowing, unorganized stock room. When you place those seasonal inventory orders, you’re trying to order enough product to keep up with customer demand without overwhelming your in-store storage space.
Commercial seasonal storage containers offer you extra storage space that help keep your business well-supplied. At Mobile Mini, we offer a range of mobile storage solutions for every storefront scenario. In short, our units can meet any inventory demand you throw at them.
Inventory isn’t the only thing to think about when planning for your seasonal business storage needs. The holiday season usually means extra staff. If you’re finding that the extra hands you’ve hired to keep your inventory organized are creating more spatial issues than they’re solving, our temporary office space may be for you. These mobile units give you extra space to house new staff and offer out-of-store space for inventory storage and tracking.
Benefits of Seasonal Storage
There’s a whole lot to say about the benefits of seasonal storage. Seasonal storage can be a real game-changer, especially for businesses that have been getting through their busy seasons without any real storage or organizational assistance. While it can be challenging to summarize the benefits of seasonal storage, the Mobile Mini team never shies away from a challenge.
- Organization: Organization is potentially one of the primary benefits of seasonal storage. During the busy season, things can go from orderly to chaotic real fast. Seasonal storage gives you a space to store and organize your commercial supplies to prevent loss, damage, and theft.
For example, our hospitality customers often use their seasonal storage containers to organize holiday decorations and supplies, ensuring that they’re easy to access and fully operational when needed. For retail clients, seasonal storage containers provide a secondary stockroom, allowing employees to store, track, and sort through inventory during holiday rushes and other busy periods.
- Security: Do you know what’s worse than not being able to find that summer display rack or holiday wreath? Not being able to find that display rack because someone stole it during the off-season. Seasonal storage containers keep your business supplies safe from inclement or extreme weather and out of the hands of thieves. With United States businesses losing over $50 billion per year to theft, this added protection is a significant benefit.
- Portability: At Mobile Mini, all of our seasonal storage containers are designed to be easily moved from location to location, allowing you to meet multiple needs with one unit. This aspect of seasonal storage is extremely beneficial for customers who own businesses that have different seasonal storage needs at different times.
- Versatility: One of our customers’ favorite aspects of seasonal storage is that these containers are versatile and easy to adapt to meet your needs, even as those needs change, grow, and evolve. For example, some of our customers use their seasonal storage containers to house inventory in the fall and winter and then convert their unit into a document storage site with a few shelves and some blinds in spring and summer. Our units are very easy to reconfigure, giving you the flexibility you need to meet any and all commercial storage needs that come up.
When to Consider Seasonal Storage
Many of our customers struggle with figuring out if seasonal storage is for them. If you find yourself in one of the following situations, chances are your business will benefit from a seasonal storage container:
- A retail store owner looking for a space to house surplus inventory during holidays and busy periods.
- An educational administrator looking to store school books, supplies, and tech during summer and school breaks.
- A hotel or restaurant owner looking to store seasonal equipment that tends to clutter and block open kitchen and lobby space.
- An agricultural outlet looking to store equipment and materials during slow months or to prepare for upcoming harvests.
- A construction project manager looking for a safe, weatherproof, and secure space to keep equipment during times of non-use.
Who Is Seasonal Storage Designed For?
Everyone!
At Mobile Mini, our seasonal storage containers are designed to work for all industries and all sectors. These units come empty, giving our customers the ability to create their own storage adventure.
While our units can work anywhere, our top customers tend to come from the following industries:
This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you have a seasonal storage need and don’t see your sector reflected above, give us a call; we will get you into a unit that matches your needs, team, and company.
The Essentials
At Mobile Mini, we’re always looking for ways to make our customers’ lives better, easier, and more productive. With our Essentials packages, we give you everything you need to get the most out of your seasonal storage container.
Essentials packages include things like:
- Lighting: With proper lighting, you can load and unload your unit day or night and in dimly lit environments. Additionally, lighting makes it easier to find what you’re looking for and limits the risks of personal injury or product damage.
- Shelving: Shelves and storage just make sense! Shelving makes it easier to organize your unit, creates a better way to immediately assess what you have and where it lies, and allows you to store more sensitive or delicate items higher up and away from heavier supplies that may damage or destroy them.
- Locks: When it comes to your business, is there such a thing as too safe? Added locks give you extra piece of mind that your valuable business equipment and supplies will be just where you left them. Our locks are virtually theft-proof and keep thieves out of your stuff…it’s as simple as that.
Essentials gives you absolutely everything you need in one centralized place. It’s commercial one-stop shopping the way it should be.
Tips of the Trade
We would be remiss to leave you without offering some tips for a smooth holiday season (inventory-wise—we can’t do anything about the other stresses of family time).
- Stay calm and carry a label maker. Label everything; it will help to keep your stock organized and in fighting condition.
- Create a safe zone. Nothing is worse than a stock room or office space with no walking or breathing room. Create an aisle or pathway which will help with entry and exit and give people room to breathe.
- Keep things light. During the holiday season, stress over inventory is inevitable. When you keep things light, your staff will be more productive and your inventory needs will seem more manageable.
Contact Mobile Mini today! We’d love to help you create a storage plan to maximize your sales (and your sanity) during the holiday season.
