Advertisement
With now more than 30 locations in Greater Miami and more than 1,100 locations in 45 cities worldwide, a luggage storage company from Denmark that is facilitating flexible traveling with more than 3 million hours of stored luggage is moving to Miami.
Copenhagen-based Luggage Hero has for five years offered travelers a safe place to leave luggage for any amount of time in a day at an hourly rate of $1 or a flat $8, and its executives are now choosing Miami to launch an office that would help them oversee their business operations in the US, which are becoming highly successful.
“We picked Miami because we think that Miami is a really, really good hub to be able to do our further expansion in North America, but we are also looking to expand to South America,” said Jannik Lawaetz, CEO and co-founder of Luggage Hero.
The start-up company came out of a personal experience, said Mr. Lawaetz. During a trip to Barcelona, he became stranded outside of an Airbnb apartment at 9 a.m. with luggage to carry around until his late afternoon flight. “Normally, there would be a concierge service that would help out, but there is none when you stay at a short-time rental apartment,” he said. “If you still want to enjoy some of the city without having to carry your stuff around, you’re not able to leave your luggage behind.”
He went to shops, cafes and restaurants in Copenhagen to ask if they would be interested in partnering for luggage storage. “Suddenly, I had like 30 shops on hand saying they were willing to accept,” Mr. Lawaetz said. “And we started developing and app for the system, and people started using it. Now, we’re in 45 cities throughout Europe and US.”
The company launched in 2017 after receiving $1 million from angel investors – who usually fund start-up companies – and Danish investment fund company Vækstfonden. In 2019, Luggage Hero raised $2.25 million from venture capital company Nordic Eye and crowdfunding on the Seedrs platform. Then, it expanded to more than 40 cities across Europe and the US.
After its success in Copenhagen in 2017, the company expanded to London after three months. “People resonated well with the message about helping travelers, and it was just an easy sale because we created some valuable foot traffic for the local businesses there,” Mr. Lawaetz said. After a year and a half, Luggage Hero had 100 shops partnering with it in England.
In 2018, the company arrived in New York and started Project 36. “We wanted to go into 36 new cities during 2019,” said Thomas Bro Schaadt, the company’s head of expansion. “We picked out 14 cities in the US and we just took them one by one.”
The company developed a smart POI algorithm system to predict which cities would be best for the business.
“We’re able to scan cities and know exactly where there is demand for our service,” said Mr. Lawaetz. “That’s actually how we figured out what cities to [go to], such as Miami. That’s one of the advantages we have over the competitors in this area, that we know exactly where to put locations.”
This tool has helped Luggage Hero speed up the process of finding locations in key areas by relying on data to know where to get the fastest return on investment while entering a city. “So far, we know that we want locations close to our station, or at South Beach, throughout Washington Avenue, for example,” added Mr. Schaadt. “And then we hire people to go around, trying to kick in the door and make a partnership with the local shops.”
In Miami, the company, which has four employees after having recently hired one, is still looking to hire more to help expand locations in the area. Some of the highest performing locations are Cybr Caffe at 574 Washington Ave. in Miami Beach and Lulu’s Nitrogen Ice Cream at 2001 Biscayne Blvd. Twenty-five more partners were added during January.
Each shop, restaurant, café or hotel is certified before activation to make sure the storage space is safe, “and further, we have a third-party provider guaranteeing for each piece of luggage for $300,000 insurance,” said Mr. Lawaetz. “We have different layers of security preventing anything from happens to those.”
Still, New York is Luggage Hero’s best performing city because of the nearness of their locations to Pennsylvania Station and the Grand Central Terminal. But according to Mr. Lawaetz, Miami is the best place to open the company’s offices. “Family-wise, Florida is probably more attractive for families to move when you have kids,” he said.
“Miami seems to be the new Silicon Valley for the start-up world,” added Mr. Schaadt. “There is a big hype about moving to Miami, and start-up companies want to be inspired by others and be introduced to new people; being at the right spot at the right time is what makes things happen.”
Mr. Lawaetz and his family moved to Miami from Copenhagen in December. “We were afraid that they would close the borders to the US again, as they’ve done before,” he said. “So, we actually accelerated our moving date so we could get out of there as soon as possible and be able to get here.”
Although the company is running on a great economy moving forward, Mr. Lawaetz said he is planning on another funding round “to fuel up the expansion speed even more here in the US,” he explained. “So, we are looking for US investors and we are in talks with several venture capital firms. We expect to finish that funding [round] in this year’s first half.”
The company is also looking into expanding its services to include the buying and selling of pre-owned goods from customers that use the app in a safe, environmentally friendly way and without the hassle of having to ship their goods.
“We see that our shops can act as service hubs – hyper-local service hubs – in a lot of different ways,” Mr. Lawaetz said. “And we see that we can cater to more local people with more services because these shops have a lot to offer, they have premium locations, they have trained staff, and we see that this can actually turn into a multitude of other service areas. We see a rapid return of the traction of the travel industry, and now we’re actually looking into 2022 as our probably best year.”
https://www.miamitodaynews.com/2022/03/01/danish-luggage-hero-moving-its-home-to-miami/
