That is Eric Davis’s own account of why he built it, given to Wilmington Today in 2023. He was right about the gap, and the facility outside Wilmington, North Carolina got built into it: a secure powered yard for RVs and commercial vehicles on one side, workspace for tradesmen on the other.
What had not been worked out was who was being spoken to. Powered Storage was one name over the whole of it, and the people it needed do not think of themselves as one market. A plumber looking for somewhere to work in the day was never going to search for storage.
I made the case to Eric for breaking the facility into separate brands, drawn along the lines of who was looking and what they already called the thing they wanted. Each brand gets its own domain, its own language and its own channel. Underneath it stays one yard and one operation.
They are a family, not a set of unrelated names. Colour and imagery tell them apart and the design system beneath them is shared, so a new one can be put up quickly and still read as the same company.
It was set up to keep going rather than to be finished. When demand shows which offer belongs to which buyer, that offer splits off into a brand of its own.
Work Containers speaks to plumbers, electricians, carpenters, landscapers and distributors. Flex Town takes manufacturers and tradesmen who need five hundred to three thousand square feet with a garage door. Wilm Cold Storage takes food, beverage and pharmaceutical businesses that need a small refrigerated unit. The Office Pod is the newest of them. All of them resolve to one address outside Wilmington, North Carolina.
None of them would have arrived at a brand about powered storage. The mix keeps being re-cut as demand shows which offer belongs to which buyer. Wilmington Today covered the facility in July 2023 as a new kind of storage.
The splitting is still going on where anyone can see it. Cold storage runs as a page on powered-storage.com and as its own brand at wilmcoldstorage.com at the same time, halfway from a service to a brand.
On the customer side: the branding for Powered Storage and Flex Town, the websites, the web app, the showroom, twenty six landing pages built for twenty six different searches, and flyers and referral deals with the RV dealers down the road. On the investor side: the market and value documents and the segment overviews. The first of them was written months before the facility opened.
It went past the drawing. I had a say in the layout of the yard and where a gate belonged. I designed the showroom so a visitor could stand in it, understand the concept, see the pricing, scan a code and sign up from their phone. In the app I argued for showing less, and for moving identification out of the sign up so a tenant could pick a spot, sign and move in, then photograph a licence and insurance later.
The business decisions are Eric’s. What the outside world reads was mine to decide.
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