Selling our capacity online with Storekat
Written by Marcos Hart
Business Optimisation and Transformation Director, Wincanton
14th July 2017The team behind Storekat was one of the stand outs from W2 Labs pitch day, presenting an idea which was innovative with strong commercial potential. It was clear from our discussions with them that their proposition was backed by a team with a real understanding of the opportunities available to businesses such as Wincanton.
Storekat was conceived by its two co-founders, one with supply chain experience and the other a cloud architect, who found there was no easy way to book commercial storage online. Consequently, their platform is an easy to use online booking system which helps match businesses with space available with businesses looking to rent storage facilities.
W2 Labs is an entirely collaborative process between us, the start-ups and our customers and it’s been a real pleasure to work with the Storekat team to understand their product better and also provide them with an insider’s view of our industry. Together we are making great progress in developing, what I believe will be, a market-leading proposition for brokering free space in our warehouse network as well as yard space and even office space. We’re working closely with a number of our customers to implement this platform in our operations, prove the concept and gather real-word data for demo day in September.
Of course, in these early stages there are still hurdles to overcome but I remain confident that our collaborative nature as a business and the strength of the relationship we have with the team and our customers will mean that we have a fantastic product in the near future.
Kevin Forcier, Co-founder of Storekat, said of the W2 Labs process so far: “W2 Labs has been a fantastic experience for myself and the Storekat team. It’s great to work with a big company like Wincanton with all their resources but also the drive and motivation to really shake things up. We’re looking forward to demonstrating our great product on demo day.”
As a joint team we’re working directly with our customers and expect to have a live trial underway by week 7 of the W2 Labs programme. This will give us the real-world results to demonstrate the viability and commercial value of the platform when it comes to presenting it to the business on demo day.
Look out for further updates from our sponsors and start-ups as we share more on the progress of our W2 Labs programme.