The Bourbon Friday Show

The Bourbon Friday Show with Eric Laurent from Roo Storage

On this episode of the Bourbon Friday Show, we had the opportunity to talk to Eric Laurent, Founder and CEO of Roo Storage.

On this episode of the Bourbon Friday Show, we had the opportunity to talk to Eric Laurent, Founder and CEO of Roo Storage.

Roo: The Airbnb of Storage

Like many entrepreneurs, Laurent came up with what would later be a business, while searching for a solution to a common problem.

Namely, the problem of inflexible and expensive self-storage.

During his time in college, Laurent had a gap between leases during the summer months. With that in mind, he began trying to find a place to store his stuff, but ended up having little success. It turned out that all nearby storage facilities were full, with the nearest one being over half an hour away.

In hopes of finding another option, he began to ask around to see if anyone had any extra space for a couple of weeks. Eventually he found a garage that wasn’t being used just three doors down from where he was living.

Which is where the idea for Roo began.

Armed with the information of a budding sharing economy, Laurent sought to find out if a similar business model would work for the storage industry.

“So I knew about the sharing economy—I knew about Airbnb and Uber and Rover and I thought, ‘I wonder if I can take that same business model and put it into the storage industry’,” says Laurent.

With the demand for storage space increasing year after year, Roo has found success with their college student target market and are looking to include the storage needs of young professionals and young families.

Put simply: “Roo is an online platform that connects the unused space in our community with people in need of storage,” says Laurent. “So think of it as Airbnb, but instead of housing people, you’re storing boxes.”

With their online platform, people are able to find flexible storage options that suit their needs.

For example, most storage facilities require payment per month or year, but with Roo, people can pay for only the days they need to use the space.

Additionally, all storage hosts have had a background check, their spaces vetted for security and safety, and have signed a contract regarding the do’s and dont’s of the business.

Currently Roo offers both residential and commercial storage options to suit a variety of needs and space requirements. If you would like to learn more about Roo or how to rent or list a storage space, go to https://roostorage.com/ for more information.

Bourbon Friday // Startups, Changemakers, Business, Bourbon
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Bourbon Innovation

As always, the Bourbon Friday team does their best to choose a fitting drink for the occasion.

The bottle this week was Buffalo Trace Bourbon. In recent years, Buffalo Trace has been experimenting with how bourbon is stored during the aging process and what factors have the most effect on the bourbon.

These factors included different levels of barrel char, different placements in the rickhouse, a variety of temperature and humidity control, as well as lighting differences. By doing this, they were able to gather over 6 million data points in order to find out the ideal settings in which to create bourbons with specific characteristics.

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