In Conversation with Harry Bremner, Founder of Local Student Storage

This article has kindly been sponsored by Local Student Storage.

As April dawns on St Andrews, the age-old panic ensues: final exams are fast approaching, flights have been booked, and a year’s worth of belongings suddenly need a new home for the summer. For the town’s large international community, the logistics of transporting heavy coats, golf clubs, and kitchenware are a recurring nightmare; one that Harry Bremner has a solution for.

The founder of Local Student Storage (LSS), a St Andrews-based storage company, Bremner launched his business in response to the yearly stress of the April-to-May move-out. It was in 2015, when Bremner was still a St Andrews student himself, that he first recognised the need for better storage options. 

“It was around April, and I'd been speaking to a lot of friends, and they were thinking, you know, I'm looking at renting a van to go to a storage unit, because I've got all my pillows, my books, and I don't want to take [them] back to Norway or the States or Taiwan. And I thought to myself, there's got to be an easier way,” Bremner told The Saint.

Thus, LSS began to take shape, though the company didn’t start in an industrial warehouse. Instead, Bremner first launched his business out of a family attic. 

“My grandparents live about twenty minutes from St Andrews, and I realised I could just take a few friends’ suitcases and store them in my granny’s attic,” Bremner recounted. 

“But once I started doing that, more and more people asked if I could store their things too. And I thought, maybe there's a business here.”

As the company grew, and Bremner was eventually forced to move the business out of the attic, LSS never lost sight of its roots in the St Andrews community. 

“My first year, we had just seventeen students using the service. By the time I graduated, it was about one in ten [...] students in St Andrews that used the service. So it's incredibly popular and I'm very proud of that as well. It’s expanded into a much bigger operation. But it's still managed by people that live in and around St. Andrews.”

In fact, Bremner believes that it is primarily this student-first point of view that sets LSS apart from its competitors. Today, the company has become one of the most widely used student storage service in St Andrews. 

“The brand has been curated from a student's point of view. When I was at St Andrews, I knew exactly what people needed when move-out season came around. And I think that's quite a big differentiator. Because we started as students ourselves, we understand what people actually need. That personal touch is something you don’t always get with larger storage companies,” Bremner said.

“Students rarely know exactly how much they’ll need to store. That’s why we only charge after collection, and if you order more boxes than you use, you don’t pay for them. We try to keep everything as flexible and affordable as possible. And if you decide the morning we're meant to collect your stuff, that you need more time, you'll get more time. We're super flexible with that, and we do tend to be the most affordable option as well.”

Now a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur based in London, Bremner still credits the small student venture he launched from a flat in DRA Scott Flat 3 as the foundation for his later success.

Now, with the move-out season once again approaching, Bremner offered two pieces of advice to current St Andrews students. The first is for the University’s aspiring entrepreneurs:

“My advice would be don’t hold back. Try things, and don’t be afraid if something doesn’t work out. If one idea fails, you can improve it or pivot to something new. Don't have a fear of failure.”

And the second piece of advice? Make your booking with LSS sooner rather than later. 

“We're now taking bookings, things are open. I mean, bookings are actually already filling up a little bit. We do tend to sell out every year,” Bremner warned. 

Though a lot has changed for Bremner since 2015, even eleven years later, his core mission remains the same: “We want to make students’ lives easy.”

https://www.localstudentstorage.com