Pelican Self Storage Brand Guidelines: A 2009 Danish Start, Selstor & Three Nordic Capitals

A Danish start backed by a property investor.

Pelican Self Storage began in Denmark in 2009. Its Danish website says it was founded by the property investors Nordic Real Estate Partners (NREP) and Evergreen Real Estate Partners. Inside Self Storage reported in April 2012 that it had been set up with capital from a US pension fund and NREP, and Swedish Wikipedia names the London firm M3 Capital Partners as the early investor alongside NREP. Fastighetsvärlden, the Swedish property weekly, described Pelican in December 2012 as NREP’s self-storage company and named Claus Mathisen as its chief executive and co-founder.

The company spread quickly around the Nordic capitals. Its Finnish website says Finnish operations began in 2010. By March 2012, Inside Self Storage reported, Pelican had four facilities in the Helsinki area when it opened two more sites: a five-floor building of about 6,350 square metres with 800 units in the Sydhavnen district of Copenhagen, beside a busy road, and a site at Ala-Tikkurila in Helsinki. The same report said a fifth Danish facility was already planned for Brøndby, and quoted the company’s plan to build in Denmark, Finland and Sweden.

Sweden came by acquisition. In December 2012 Fastighetsvärlden reported that Pelican was buying Selstor, a Swedish operator founded in 2007 by Michael Fogelberg, who had earlier been responsible for Shurgard’s European launch. Selstor then had eight facilities — five in the Stockholm area and one each in Västerås, Örebro and Linköping — with two more under construction in Botkyrka and Norrköping. The magazine described the purchase as a quick way for NREP into the Swedish market. Fogelberg told it that a large owner would let the business expand and develop its storage concept further; Shurgard, the magazine noted, then led the Swedish segment with 30 facilities of its own.

Heated rooms, staffed shops and a wine cellar.

Pelican describes itself almost entirely through what is inside its buildings. Its Swedish website lists storage rooms, garages, lockers, wine storage, conference rooms, motorhome parking and trailers to borrow, with separate sections for private and business customers; business customers are offered goods reception, waste handling and flexible cancellation, the company says. It promises heated storage rooms “in the size you are looking for,” staff on site at every facility and access from half past five in the morning until ten at night.

The Finnish site makes similar points in its own words: tidy, dry and well-lit units, camera surveillance around the clock, heated and ventilated rooms, loading areas and trolleys for moving goods. In June 2016 Inside Self Storage, citing the Helsinki Times, reported that the new Töölö facility — Pelican’s fifteenth in the Helsinki market — offered units from 1 to 100 square metres with keycode access and on-site management. Its manager told the paper that cellars in central apartment buildings were small or being turned into laundry rooms and saunas, and that flats were being built into attics, which left many city residents with little storage space. He added that customers expecting a late delivery could contact the site in advance to arrange access, even in the middle of the night.

Each country has its own website and domain — pelican.se, pelican.dk and pelican.fi — in the local language, with an English version in Sweden, a shared “MyPelican” customer account, a size guide and an online shop for moving supplies such as boxes and tape. The Danish site calls Pelican one of the Nordic region’s largest self-storage chains, with about 40 centres across Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and says the company is still opening new locations.

Design and documentation.

Self-storage is a property business that has to sell itself to people at a moment of change: a move, a renovation, a smaller home or a growing stock of inventory. The way operators present themselves follows from that. The building is the first advertisement, and cladding, roll-up doors and roadside signs can all carry a brand colour. Where a company publishes its building colours or signage system, this guide reports them as the company’s own description.

Online, the category has settled on a familiar set of tools. An operator’s website can lead with a store finder, a unit size guide that explains what fits in each space, a choice of unit types such as heated or drive-up storage, packing supplies and an account page for paying rent and booking. When one owner runs several regional brands, those sites can share a single template, with only the name, the city list and the colours changing, as StorageVault’s Access Storage and Sentinel Storage sites did in November 2026.

Campaigns and characters do the work the buildings cannot. Some operators use mascots, slogans or sports sponsorships to make a functional service memorable; StorageVault, for example, took stadium and broadcast signage with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2023, according to Inside Self Storage. When a guide mentions a mascot or campaign, it says where and when the company used it.

Behind the shop front sits a corporate layer. Some operators are listed companies or real estate investment trusts, or are owned by private-equity firms and family groups, and their investor pages explain store counts, rentable area, acquisitions and listings. Those figures are given here only as a dated source states them, and mergers or takeovers that have not closed are described as pending, with the date they were announced.

About forty sites in three countries.

The network has also been trimmed in places. In July 2018 Inside Self Storage reported that Shurgard, the European operator then affiliated with Public Storage, had agreed to buy five Pelican facilities in Sweden — two in Östergötland and one each in Örebro, Stockholm and Västmanland — taking them over on 1 July and rebranding them as Shurgard. Pelican’s Swedish business now centres on Greater Stockholm: its website lists ten facilities, from Botkyrka in the south to Upplands Väsby in the north, including two on Lidingö and one on Kungsholmen, and gives its Swedish office in Täby. The company says most of its users are private customers storing household goods and personal belongings, for a move, a renovation, a cellar or attic conversion or the change of seasons, alongside a significant number of business users.

The group structure sits above the three countries. The Swedish site describes Pelican as an organisation based in Luxembourg with subsidiaries in Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and Swedish Wikipedia names the parent company as NSS Pelican S.à r.l. in Luxembourg. The Danish holding company is based in Virum, north of Copenhagen, and the Finnish office is in Helsinki. Swedish Wikipedia counted 39 facilities in May 2025: ten around Stockholm, 13 around Copenhagen, 15 around Helsinki and one in Turku. The Finnish site now gives 16 Finnish locations in the capital region and Turku. Denmark has grown too: Inside Self Storage counted eight Danish facilities in 2016.

For a design guide, Pelican Self Storage shows how a regional chain can carry one name across three languages and three domains while each country site speaks to its own city. Compare Shurgard, which took over five of its Swedish facilities in 2018, and Safestore, another European operator. For this guide we use a fjord blue, a warm sand and an orange accent with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pelican Self Storage’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.