Put Your Closet in the Cloud with Makespace

Since launching last September, Makespace has helped hundreds of New Yorkers store thousands of items through its on-demand storage service. Photo: Makespace

About a year ago, Sam Rosen started working on an easy, affordable way to store excess belongings–clothing, keepsakes and seasonal items like air conditioners and bikes. He wanted to create a system in which the stored stuff was out of sight, but never far from reach–similar to the way digital miscellany floats on the Internet ether, freeing up hard drive space, but retrievable at a moment’s notice.

“I literally wanted to create a cloud storage for physical things,” says Rosen, who lives in Brooklyn Heights and came up with the idea for Makespace after schlepping what remained of an ex-girlfriend’s flooded apartment to a storage facility following Hurricane Sandy.

Makespace delivers free storage bins to your apartment (the commercial-grade kind with the hinged lids that fold into one another). You schedule a pick-up and they come get them and store them for you. The service starts at $25/month for four bins with a three-month minimum. When you want one or all of your bins back there’s a $29 delivery fee. Have stuff already in boxes? They will also store your own containers at the same cost ($6.25/three cubic feet), and oversized items like skis and luggage carry their own monthly fees. “We’re cheaper than the cost of a roundtrip taxi and an hour of your time,” says Rosen, comparing the Makespace experience to renting a self-storage unit.

Brooklyn Heights resident Sam Rosen was looking for a way to create a cloud for your closet when he came up with the idea for Makespace. Photo: Makespace

An inventory of all your items lives online for your eyes only, and you can arrange to have any or all of your bins brought back to you on demand, or shipped somewhere else should you move out of the local delivery zone. All your belongings are insured (up to $250/bin) by the company.

“Our general rule of thumb is that we take anything one person can carry,” Rosen says. “We’ve literally carried moose heads.”

Rosen says the company draws the line at furniture storage: “Your couch can’t fit in your closet.”

Makespace is looking to expand into other cities, as well as offer more than local pickup options toward the end of this year. For now, the service is operational in most of Brooklyn, so there’s no reason to wait till spring to do some cleaning.