Makespace

You probably know Patrick Janelle by his wildly popular Instagram handle, @aguynamedpatrick. This charming, young graphic designer and man about town is famous for taking incredible photos on his iPhone and for his stunning backyard parties. Janelle also happens to be a MakeSpace user. When things started to heat up this summer, Patrick ordered his bin full of backyard decor so he could trick out his Nolita apartment. We sent someone along to take photos. Check it out!

MakeSpace is a small but growing startup with a mission to provide innovative and affordable storage to New York City and eventually the entire country.  Over the past couple of months, some of our largest competitors have taken notice of the new kid on the block.  For a startup, that’s both a good thing and a scary thing.  Good because it means you’re doing something right.  Scary because it means that you’re David and Goliath now has you in his sights.

Tyler Tringas was living out of a backpack and working off his laptop in SouthEast Asia when he had to make a quick trip back to the States to attend a friend’s wedding in Vermont. This probably sounds like a logistical nightmare, but Tyler had a plan. He landed in New York City, met a MakeSpace driver in the lobby of his hotel, unpacked his tuxedo, and went to the wedding the following morning. No sweat.

Over Skype, I ask, “Do you think of yourself as a technomad or a minimalist, in terms of the way you live?” Professional photographer Collin Hughes, who has worked with everyone from Nike to Wired, laughs and then responds, “Most definitely,” as he turns his laptop’s camera from his face towards four small duffle bags in a pile on the floor. “This is everything I own right now besides what’s in MakeSpace,” he says from off camera.

  We had an awesome morning over at Union Square introducing New York City to our newly launched street team....

When it comes to living in NYC, you have to get a little thrifty. The average rental price in Manhattan is over $50 a square foot! Rather than curl up in a ball on your love seat and cry, you might want to get smart about what you do with your extremely valuable space.

We all know that New York City is insane, but this story from The Real Deal takes the cake. Manhattan’s most talked-about luxury apartment building, One57, will be selling storage bins to its residents for $4,000 a square foot!

We’re honored that Tim O’Reilly featured MakeSpace as an example of a start-up that’s rethinking how real-world things work in his talk “The Internet of Things and Humans” at the 2014 Solid Conference. O’Reilly has also blogged about us.

No one suffers under the insanity of this city more than parents. DNAInfo reports that parents have been basically forced to start sleeping their babies in bathrooms, closets, and any other unused spaces they can find around their tiny apartments.

Well, it’s taken an incredibly long time, but it looks like winter is finally, truly, wonderfully, superbly gone from New York City. May is pretty late to be thinking about spring cleaning, but what are you gonna do?

It’s 2014; we live on our smartphones, our relationships are as textual as they are physical, and as impersonal as it sounds, people actually break up over gchat. At this point it’s pretty much a cliché to send a breakup text, and in New York City, where no one has a car and apartments are in short supply, dealing with a breakup is especially hard. Here at MakeSpace, we truly want everyone to find love, but we also know that sometimes it’s just not meant to be. That’s why we’re going to teach you how to transition through a breakup in 2014, using the luxuries afforded by modern technology.

When we heard that the first ever ‘cat cafe’ in North America was opening just a ten minute walk from our office, we had to go. These coffee shops full of playful kitties have long been popular in Tokyo, where strict renter laws prevent most citizens from keeping pets in their apartments, but these havens for cat-lovers are seemingly perfect for New York City where lots of animal lovers can’t keep a pet in their apartment for a different reason, because they just don’t have the space.