Lovespace has been collecting and taking care of hundreds of thousands of items since 2012.
The company, founded by entrepreneurs Brett Akkar and Steve Folwell, is the UK’s first storage by the box service, offering collection and delivery nationwide. It’s an award-winning, convenient, and cheap alternative to self-storage.
Like other shared economy business models such as Uber or Airbnb, Lovespace uses technology to connect its customers with ‘pay-as-you-store’ storage space. Lovespace’s business is growing at a phenomenal rate. In the last three years, revenues have soared from £300,000 to £2.4M. This growth is made possible in part by the company’s flexible warehouse strategy and innovative in-house technology which allows Lovespace to quickly plug in courier partners and scale up rapidly.
Low costs aside, there are several other compelling reasons for Lovespace’s success, chiefly its convenience and ease of use. A customer can simply book a service via a desktop PC, laptop or mobile device within minutes. Lovespace then collects the items the following day and delivers them free to any destination in the UK. Boxes are stored for as long as the customer requires in a secure warehouse and can then be delivered to any other UK location irrespective of the original pick-up point. And soon customers will be able to modify their orders and track their drivers through an app.
Behind the scenes, Lovespace operates through a complex system, which is underpinned by its bespoke technology for managing warehouses and drivers. Within this context it is a tech leader, using technology as the foundation of its operations, including scanning boxes, scheduling pick-ups and deliveries, taking orders, essentially enabling on-demand storage with a few clicks.
When the company started out, it was using a self-managed server to manage its technology infrastructure, but its rapid growth brought challenges. Dave Walker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Lovespace, explains: “Being the first and being the best in a new sector always helps with gaining traction, but we hit scale issues around the smart deployment of technology due to our rapid growth... Given that we serve the whole of the UK, we had to build the business so it wouldn’t break when demand floods in. For instance, there tend to be seasonal peaks when students are starting and leaving college. As such, we sought a first-class hosting partner that could host our technology infrastructure and help us with deployment.”
When looking for a solution, Lovespace turned to Aptum. Aptum is a global provider of business-to-business products and services, such as Managed Infrastructure, Networking and Security, Managed Cloud Platform and Managed Services and Support.
The company has a wide range of customers and a strong reputation built on professional, robust and flexible services, delivered from a network that spans Canada, the United States and Europe. It also has multiple points of presence, including Germany, the Netherlands and Mexico.
Above all, Lovespace was looking for a partner who could not only guarantee scalability to keep pace with its rapid customer growth, but could also provide failover and disaster recovery services.
Importantly, it also wanted protection against distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) which are becoming increasingly common as malicious hackers seek to take down businesses and disrupt services.
“Knowing that our services are always available, even in the event of some kind of disaster, is invaluable. We have strong safeguards in place thanks to Aptum’s failover and disaster recovery service, so we can always keep operating no matter what.”
Without its technology infrastructure, Lovespace wouldn’t be in business. As such, the back-up and disaster recovery services provided by Aptum are essential to its continued operations.
“With Aptum services, we have built our business to scale when the need demands. There is now no limit to our growth”
Aptum provides Lovespace with the scalability it needs to not only accommodate a doubling of business every year, but also handle website traffic surges during peak periods.
“Our customers test our service in so many different ways… we need a technology partner that is flexible enough to support us when we need to make infrastructure changes for new processes or new technologies. This is what Aptum does.”
Lovespace’s strategic partnership with Aptum is essential to its business development. “One of our overarching objectives is to ensure we deliver a first-class service to our customers, because this is where true growth comes from,” explains Dave.
