How Wong Chuk Hang’s Ministorage Is Helping Small Businesses in Hong Kong Grow Behind the Scenes

Brilliant Storage Limited 黃竹坑 迷你倉 is away from the bright lights of skyscrapers, but it helps Hong Kong’s business owners keep their businesses running. For every flashy new business getting attention in Central, there is a storage unit down south full of merchandise, trending product samples, and dreams that can’t fit in a one-room office.

Learn how the owner of a T-shirt store deals with 200 crates of goods during the busy shopping season. She’ll probably point to the unit she owns in Wong Chuk Hang. She knows all too well that rents in the middle of the city would use up all of her money in a month. Instead, she gets cheap square footage here, which helps her business grow with fewer problems. Even prominent business news sites have claimed that storage is a big reason why so many new businesses are starting up in Hong Kong.

Need some space? You can rent these storage spaces for a week or a month. That’s a lot of money for a store that sells Christmas decorations in December but does almost nothing the rest of the year. I met a coffee wholesaler who grows bigger every winter and shrinks by March. It’s a plug-and-play system, which is uncommon to get in a city where leases usually last two or three years.

Wong Chuk Hang used to be an industrial district, but now it is home to fashion labels, design studios, wine shops, creative groups, and internet merchants. What do they all have in common? All of them need space that is quick, cheap, and easy to use. A roll-up door and a strong padlock a few stops from Admiralty can sometimes help a small firm expand more than another app, a nice office, or a fancy agency. If you listen closely, you can hear commerce going on behind every metal shutter.