Stor-Age Brand Guidelines: A 2005 Cape Town Start, a 2015 JSE Listing & Storage King

A family-founded self-storage fund in Cape Town.

Stor-Age was started in Cape Town in 2005. English Wikipedia names its founders as Gavin Lucas, Stephen Lucas, Les Lucas and Steven Horton, and the company’s investor-relations site says its executive team saw an opening that year for a specialised, niche self-storage property fund. Its first property opened in Edgemead, Cape Town, in 2006; Inside Self Storage, writing in 2017, described the business as established in 2006 by the Lucas family. At that point, the report said, Stor-Age ran 44 properties, mainly in four South African metropolitan areas, with about 300,000 square metres of space.

The company says it carried out two nationwide studies of the South African self-storage market, the first in 2007 and the second completed in March 2014, using methods drawn from more developed markets abroad, and that both shaped its medium- to long-term planning. South Africa introduced REIT legislation in 2013, and in November 2015 the company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange as Stor-Age Property REIT Limited, a fully integrated and internally managed REIT, it says. English Wikipedia calls it South Africa’s first listed specialist self-storage property fund; the company says it was the first self-storage REIT listed on an emerging-market exchange. In 2022 its chief executive described it as one of only 11 publicly traded self-storage REITs in the world.

The portfolio grew from 24 properties at listing to 109 trading stores by late 2025, 63 in South Africa and 46 in the UK, according to a company results statement published by the SA REIT Association in November 2025. In September 2022 the shares gained a secondary listing on A2X, the Sandton-based exchange, English Wikipedia says.

From a locker to a tennis court.

In South Africa the brand is presented through its stores. The Stor-Age website says it trades from more than 60 locations, with stores in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Port Elizabeth and Bloemfontein, and offers more than 40 unit sizes, from “as small as a locker” to “as large as a tennis court.” A space estimator helps customers choose a unit, an online quote shows the monthly figure, and the site sets out renting as three simple steps: choose a size, get a quote, then visit the store, where staff show the customer an individually alarmed unit.

Around the units sit services for different customers. The company lists personal, business and student storage, van hire, removals, parcel collection and insurance, and says each store sells packaging such as boxes, bubble wrap, tape and padlocks. It describes its units as clean, dry and flexible, for household, business and student needs, whether a customer is moving house, renovating or short of space at home or at work.

The company has also grown by buying smaller local operators and by building its own stores. In its year to March 2022 it bought Silver Park Self Storage and Green Cube Self Storage in Cape Town, and construction began at Morningside and Bryanston in Johannesburg under its joint venture with Nedbank’s Corporate and Investment Banking division, according to its results statement. In October 2025 it bought two KwaZulu-Natal properties operated by Lock Up Storage, in Pinetown and New Germany. It has also announced a flagship in De Waterkant on the Cape Town foreshore which, at 13 storeys, the company says will be the tallest self-storage property in South Africa.

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.

A Cape Town owner for a UK name.

The first step abroad came in 2017. On 7 September that year Inside Self Storage reported that Stor-Age had agreed to buy Storage King, a UK operator with 13 owned facilities and 12 more under licensing and management agreements, mainly in south-east England, from its private-equity shareholder Cabot Square. Storage King’s management kept a 2.7 percent stake, and the UK company also owned the Storage King name across Europe, the report said. Gavin Lucas told the publication that the UK offered a relative undersupply of self storage compared with the United States and Australia, and a language, culture and regulatory system familiar to South Africans. These were Stor-Age’s first properties outside South Africa, and English Wikipedia dates the completed purchase to November 2017. The company’s later statements refer to its UK stores by the Storage King name.

UK growth since then has run largely through partners. With the property investor Moorfield, Stor-Age bought McCarthy’s Storage World and Storagebase in 2022, English Wikipedia says, and in June 2025 it opened a property in Acton, West London, under the same joint venture. In 2024 it agreed to manage UK stores for the investment firm Hines, which has begun building a Storage King in Chelmsford, and in September 2025 it took on management of a property in Exeter for Time Investments, the company says. Its 2030 property plan, the fourth such plan since 2010, targets 90 properties in South Africa and 70 in the UK. Closing occupancy at the end of September 2025 was 90.6 percent — 92.1 percent in South Africa and 85.2 percent in the UK — the company reported.

For a design guide, Stor-Age shows how one owner can run two names in two markets, keeping its own brand at home and a bought name in Britain. Compare Big Yellow and Safestore, two UK self-storage operators. For this guide we use a slate, a warm amber and a chalk white with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Stor-Age’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.