Start-up Stasher celebrates hitting 100,000 stored bag mark

Firm aims to consolidate presence in UK and Europe and expand into US and Asia Continue reading →

Pictured: Jacob Wedderburn-Day speaking at the Travolution Start-up summit

UK travel start-up Stasher has broken the 100,000 mark for the number of bags it has stored for its customers.

The firm is now targeting half a million bags in the next 12 months as it consolidates its presence in the UK and Europe and expands into the US and Asia.

Founded by three university friends in 2015, Stasher enables travellers to store their luggage with accredited ‘hosts’ at a variety of city centre locations for a nominal fee.

The firm’s app stasher.com launched just 18 months ago and is fully optimised for mobile from launching 18 months ago.

Stasher’s 100,000th bag was ‘Stashed’ on Thursday last week at 7am in Amsterdam, the company said.

Chief commercial officer Anthony Collias said: “We’re so pleased to have achieved this goal so quickly.

“It’s really validated the vision we took to our investment partners, and couldn’t have been achieved without the support of the Stasher team, our StashPoint hosts and of course, our users.

“We estimate that, if all of the bags we have stashed were stacked on top of each other, the pile would be taller than Everest and K2 combined, or fill over 100 747s.

“A bag is now stashed with us every minute. That’s a lot of bags! But for us it is just the beginning.

“We’ve got big ambitions for expansion beyond Europe where we see the need for safe, convenient and good value bag storage locations to be just as strong as we suspected it would be in the UK, and where we know we can help potential StashPoint hosts realise a new source of revenue.

“We’re working with a broad range of partners from lastminute.com to National Express to spread our message and are looking forward to building that network further as we enter the next phase of our development.”

Stasher secured original seed funding from James Gibson, founder of Big Yellow Storage, and VC investment from VentureFriends, Charlotte Street Capital and, previous Trivago investors, Howzat Partners.

The company says it is now scaling fast, adding an average five new cities per month and plans to be in every major city tourist destination before the summer of 2019.

Last month, it won the Expedia Affiliate Network and Hotels.com Jumpstart accelerator programme prize.

More: CityStasher announces $1.1 million funding round to boost European expansion