Webinar european smart storage solutions

I think we're live.

Yeah. Hi everyone.

Can you see and hear as well by the way?

Just checking.

I believe so, yeah. Thumbs up.

Yeah. Okay. Welcome to our webinar. Just a few things before we start. We're gonna have some questions and polls during the webinar. So just be careful to see them and yeah, ask any questions you have. We'll try to address them as we move forward.

Yeah. Let's introduce ourselves. I'm Gaene. I am, I do business development and right now I jumped in more to sales to being sales manager in Europe. And the host is Brian, our CEO and co founder. Yeah. And he will mainly.

Do the webinar and I will try to monitor all of your questions. So let's get started and hope this will be a good one. Yeah, you can.

Thanks, Joanna. Yeah, appreciate it. So another few housekeeping is if you have to jump off at any given time or if you are unable to join, you'll be automatically getting a recording sent to your email afterwards. Beyond that, please ask questions, respond to polls. We're going to be talking a little bit focused mostly on luggage storage in Europe. It's been kind of a hot topic over the last instead 12 months. We're also going to be focusing on our software and software demos, not touching too much on the hardware and different integrations that we have. I think most of you are hardware centric people that are on this call and everyone obviously knows that we're integrates in hardware agnostic so we won't kind of touch on that too much, but we'll dive in.

Okay. So for you that don't know who Colony is. So we initially started in 2016 as a software company focused on the micro mobility space, bike share, scooter shares and based in the Chicago suburbs. We have a global team with majority of our technical team in Costa Rica and then a good number of people here in the United States. In 2019 we made the.

Big focus into the smart locker industry and really kind of focus on disrupting the smart locker industry with software that really hasn't been seen before.

We have a team of really talented software engineers, business development, marketing, customer service representatives, again based all throughout the. All throughout the world. And today obviously you have already been introduced to myself and Diana that some of you have met maybe both of us at the parcel and post show a few weeks ago and we are both kind of focused on the European market.

So diving into the luggage locker industry.

And kind of what I always look to see from a top down is the total available market And I found this quite interesting. There are, of the top 15, well traveled, most traveled destinations in Europe, there's over 120 million annual visitors.

Stretching from London all the way down to Dublin. In the top 15.

These people are frequently staying in, obviously hotels, hostels, and Airbnbs.

This statistic was quite interesting. Europe saw 1.19 billion nights stayed in hotels and Airbnbs over the first six months of 2023. That was up 2% from 2019. So pre pandemic levels, it was already surpassed, which I also thought was a very incredible statistic that we've reclaimed where we were back pre pandemic levels.

The luggage storage industry had been for decades quite fragmented. There's a lot of storefronts, gas stations or convenience stores that you would pay to have your luggage stored. It's been a little bit more tech enabled over the last five, four or five years with companies like Luggage Hero, Stasher, Bounce, all these companies creating marketplaces that these businesses can join and start generating revenue by storing luggage in any of these locations. Collectively, these five companies have raised over $25 million in venture capital over the last five years. And they've all really kind of made their mark quite quickly in the luggage storage industry.

Sorry, go ahead.

Yes.

Yeah, I think the screen is smaller for us. Can you make it bigger? The one that you're sharing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me see here.

How about that?

Is that better?

I think we don't see our screen right now. Maybe I stop sharing.

Yeah, better. Better.

Okay, great, thanks. All right, so taking a step back here, a lot of these marketplaces that have really risen over the last five years that you see here on the screen have really kind of taken this fragmented industry and made it a little bit more mainstream, you know, reducing friction for users, allowing people to book these accommodations for their luggage from their smartphone and connect them much easier to different luggage holders and businesses around these cities. The other thing that they've also done is created additional reassurances with insurance for your luggage for each, for each stay, for each rental, and, you know, you know, also vetting these locations as well to make sure that these things are being stored in credible locations.

The pricing we see on average from these five, plus a few others that we pulled, is about $1.15 per hour on average and $5 a day. And remember these numbers. We'll talk about this a little bit later on the return on investment.

But we see a lot of problems, and customers see a lot of problems as well. Where traditional luggage rooms are Being used in these retail stores, hotels and small businesses. It provides insecurity for all the beds sitting in these same rooms. A lot of mix up can happen, lost luggage and also creating a lot of time for employees to go back and search for these luggage, for the luggage, for the people that are back into to claim their luggage.

Those bottlenecks again create a poor user experience, especially during busy times of the day. And whether they're dropping off or picking up.

Can create long lines on, on either, on either front.

So one of the things that we're really starting to see that some of these companies are starting to dabble in and we at Colony have really starting to see over the last six to 12 months is the inquiries regarding lawyers lockers in Europe specifically. And that's why we had this webinar. Provides some real key winners in this particular application. Provides more security for the user, reduces expenses.

For the host or for the company that's generating the revenue.

Enables you to place lockers in a variety of different other locations and creating small mini networks and at the end of the day generating a higher return.

Faster ROI and higher profits with every transaction by reducing those operational costs with employees and just creating a faster experience for users.

So one of the things I want to dive into here and express to all of you is kind of the return on investment. So here's a real life application and then we'll dive into the, to the calculator. So the quantity of doors for this location is 76 doors. The hardware investment upfront, one time fee is $30,000. The annual software fee is 5,000 for a total investment for the first year of 35,116.

Diana, can you see that I transitioned to another page or am I still on the slides?

We can see, you can see.

Okay, so showing off here in a quick calculator that we share with all of our resellers and partners and customers is.

The ability to see your return on investment. So from a medium locker, which was what was being used in that, in that application.

If you have.

76 transactions or 76 lockers at $5 per day, and you could even go 0.$75 per transactions per day per locker, you're coming to a return on investment of 133 days, annual profit of 55,000. And so once you get out of the first year, you have a very clear and strong return on investment with some really low maintenance lockers.

Any questions so far, Diana?

We had a poll question and no, but yeah, you can ask them whenever you have them. Just leave there and we will read.

Yeah. Any other questions specifically regarding kind of the ROI and.

How.

Can we get access to that calculator?

Yes, absolutely. This will soon be shared on our website, but we can also share this calculator with you to share with your customers as well. Absolutely.

Awesome.

Any other questions regarding the ROI calculator?

Not right now, but I see some people typing questions. So. Okay. Yeah. What is the standard size of lockers to obtain all of the luggage types?

Yeah, great question. So typically what we see is two sizes of lockers, one for your standard roller luggage. That would be your check in luggage. So I believe that is.

17. 17 and a half. Minimum of 17 and a half by.

I get those numbers. 15 and then 24 inches deep is kind of the standard for that one. And then your large check in luggage is.

I think you're around 90 millimeters. Going back and forth between inches and millimeters and 90 millimeters tall. 24 inches deep would, would get your, would get your luggage for those larger checked in luggage. So typically those two sizes. And we can, we can get those, those sizes for you as well once we're done with this.

Another question as we stopped. Do you also offer leasing formulas or where you do the investment as the supplier and work with a split profit model with the location?

Yeah, let me reread that question again.

Yeah, sure.

Good question. So we typically work with the locker manufacturers. Some of those manufacturers do offer leases.

We have not yet done the split profit model yet. There's a lot of companies that do that.

Specifically here in the United States where they offer the ability to launch the locations in a specific area and then the owner of that property doing a rev share with them. We've looked at things like that, but we're looking to kind of enable those companies to build on top of our platform. So that's not an area that we're particularly focused in the leasing options. Again, some of the locker manufacturers do offer these, but this is not something that we, that we offer as a software provider. Better.

Yeah, I think we can continue for now and.

Yeah.

All right, excellent. So we're just going to kind of dive into the software and how this enables. Because I believe this is what a lot of people probably want to see.

The software enabling these different luggage storage applications. So first we'll dive into the management software and then we'll dive into the web application for a phone app. Be the two things that we dive into today. So what you see here in front of you is the management software that any owner of lockers has access to. So once they.

Put in a purchase order, they get their lockers, they get this account information and this is their panel, this is their control system. So when they get set up, they have the ability to quickly connect their, their stripe account with about three minutes worth of filling out a form and automatically connects. And then they start diving into adding pricing. So you can even bulk upload if needed. But you can create, you know, standard hourly pricing.

That is going to be based on time. And it could be the $1, the $1.50 that's that we talked about.

For every hour. So let's just say the one, the $1. And then you can determine if you want this prorated or non prorated for every transaction, which when you're done with that, you would just hit submit and then you'd be ready to go.

After that. You can also create other options, whether it's memberships. So you can create a, you know, a monthly annual membership, recurring or non recurring, and then you can determine is this membership set up for any recurring with weekly, monthly, yearly, and then determine the value of that membership. So this might be for luggage where people are obviously frequently, more often it might also be for gyms, hospitality membership type services where people are again coming back to those lockers on a daily or weekly basis.

So that's where you can set up these requirements. You can enable them to be unlimited access, limited, a percentage of every transaction, or a fixed cost reduction off of every transaction as well.

You can also create promo codes. So this is what we're seeing a lot of luggage companies do where they're partnering with Airbnbs, partnering with hotel accommodations where they provide the promo codes for people to have access to luggage at the end of their stay and use that to get a discount.

For their locker transaction.

Yeah, someone is asking Metro stations.

Yes, Metro stations. We've been getting a handful of inquiries regarding Metro stations, larger train stations. We've even gotten some inquiries regarding.

Airports as well. There's a little bit of gray area depending on where they can be placed and security reasons. Specifically United States.

Also, again, hotels and other existing storefront businesses, museums, things like that, event centers are all places that the same model can play out for sure.

Awesome. Yeah, I think this last question we can leave for the end because it's your feedback. Yeah, you can continue with the demo right now.

Okay, great.

So once you get set up, during the onboarding call, you would set up your locations, you would identify the location, create the name. Again, this is something if you have Multiple locations, you can bulk upload and you can also do things by restricting access. In the luggage application we're talking about, obviously it's going to be unrestricted access. The other thing that's really nice is every location you can set up unique customer support, phone number and email address. You can use your default or you can set up.

A unique location or phone number and email for each location.

Once that is set up, you would start adding your devices and.

You will then be able to see.

Things like device name, locker number, what mode it's in. So in this case it would be in a storage mode. The price that's going to be associated with that transaction or with that locker, what size that locker is and then what location, what's the current status and what type of lock or, you know, locking technologies associated with that. Again, at the device level or what we, which is actually the door level, we call it the device level.

There also can be restrictions here as well. You can enable only certain groups or individual users to be assigned to that specific locker.

Customizing sizes is quite simple and straightforward. If you have multiple sizes, obviously you would want to get this set up and assign this.

You're able to quickly monitor all the all of your users that are joining the application. You can also invite new users as well through a bulk upload. So if you have some type of list or a specific customer segment that you want to invite, you can do that. Otherwise, when people join freely, those those users are then quickly added.

Another key point is that you can also add all of your team members as well. So this is. These are other people that are associated with the locker system that's either managing, operating or doing any type of administration.

Groups are also quite pivotal, especially in storage. Not so much in the payment and luggage application, but when it comes to day lockers in offices or in gyms and different places like that, you can create groups and assign those groups those certain privileges, locations and devices.

When a user reports an issue, an issue is reported into this management software. It's a really lightweight report issue area where you can address those issues, see what has been happening. Users can take pictures and submit those as well. And then you can determine if they've been resolved or if something needs to go under maintenance.

Something that's quite new for us that I've been really excited about and a lot of our customers have really like to use is the customized notifications area where you can set up custom notifications for your users at any time that will be automated. So maybe it's at the start of the transaction that you want to say within one hour after the transaction has started, they.

Will get a message saying thanks for using our Docker system. They get either a test message, email or if it's a native application, also push button notification. These can also be assigned to specific locations as well. So where we we see this the notifications play out is.

One, through using IT for marketing and getting people to return to those end user services. Number two is informing them of specific instructions. So if there's certain something regarding a specific location that they need to do in their return, this might be adding a PIN code to enter a certain door, for example. Those messages then can be automated and set up. So that's why we have this set up per location is you can create additional layer of instructions and reminders for people when they're checking out and engaging in that specific location.

Any questions on any of this stuff here?

All right.

So one of the things I don't want to dive too far into, but is quite valuable in for us to capture business for these luggage storage with these luggage storage companies and people that are looking to deploy luggage luggage lockers is also the ability with our rental applications and in mode where it enables them to reassign specific lockers. Future proofing those lockers and using that initial investment for their use cases also allows them to expand their revenue and expand their lockers if they're getting up higher capacity levels. And really what the rental asset management or rental option gives them is the ability for in certain tourist areas to maybe rent beach chairs, rent volleyball, soccer balls, a variety of things that maybe even car seats we've seen for children, they can rent all these things along with storing their luggage maybe on their first day in or their last day out. So that option of renting items in lockers while they're also generating revenue of storing that person's luggage, it's a big differentiator to be honest. And it allows them to.

Whenever I present this, it really gets them thinking. You can see the light bulbs really kind of coming on because depending on where they're located, whether it's a beach town, an urban center, these, you know, the items that can be placed inside that people could, could see a value are always different. It's always kind of fun to see what people are coming up with. But this is what the inventory page enables, right? So enables them to manage all of their assets, upload them, assign them to lockers, creating different groups as well, different product groups and managing that inventory. So some of the nice Things that you'll see here is you'll see the cost, the sale price, which if it was a vending option, what they would be bought at. And some of the nice things that we're doing on the back end is seeing.

The amount of day or amount of transactions for return on investment and analytics like that for them to continue to monitor. So it's become quite a powerful tool. And not just rental of assets in the sense of renting them in the public domain, but also asset management tools as well for more commercial and industrial uses.

One of the things you'll see here as well is that we also have the ability for multi tenant. So where we're really seeing businesses utilize this and grow their business is essentially almost a franchise model where they're developing the total solution of lockers, service the technology and then selling that entire package to other customers of theirs, their business model. And the multi tenant allows them to do that, allows each company in each organization to manage and set up their own rules, their own pricing, and manage all of their own assets and lockers. But they can all be managed by this hierarchy of, of the tenant and the sub tenant. I see. Do we have another question that come through, Diana?

Yeah, it was just a question for the public. We have one that you haven't answered yet, but I will give it to you at the end when you are done with the demo.

Yeah, excellent. Great. Okay, so I think we're kind of through this.

And we will jump over to the web application. So this web application hasn't actually really been seen too much by the general public. We haven't actively marketed this yet beyond some demos with potential customers. But this is what we're calling Colony Light. And I guess it's a little sneak peek on all the different modes that can happen from just one single web application. So this would be. If we go back here and log out initially they would. The user would scan the QR code of that location. Each location would have a unique QR code. They would sign up with either their phone or email address, get verified by an otp, and then if there's only storage, this page is actually going to be skipped. But just to show all the different applications from rental, storage, vending, delivery and service pickup. If all those things were enabled, they would be able to choose what, what application or what mode they were looking to start. In this case, we're doing storage. If there's multiple different sizes here, then you would select the size that you're looking to rent. You're assigned a locker.

You Input your debit and credit card and then that is authorized and you begin that transaction at that time. You can lock it, unlock that locker as many times as you want throughout that transaction. There's a clip, there's a timer. That happens up here and then when you're done, you can end that transaction. But if you have a.

And then you can, you can report back to home. So makes it very easy. You can rent multiple lockers at a single time and it makes for a really fast and simplistic application for users where there's no bottleneck at the kiosk. We do offer the kiosk application, but we see majority of the use cases when it comes to storage being phone. Because of reducing that bottleneck at a single kiosk, people are much more comfortable putting their, their credit card information on, on their phone instead of swiping at a kiosk a lot of times when they're traveling. So all those things enable a really fast and great user experience. Any questions regarding that? I see some things maybe coming up.

Yeah. Tune asks how does the lock button work in the app.

And does that mean work with door that can auto close and auto lock? How does the lock button work in the app?

How does the lock button work in the app? Okay, so great question. When I would go back here.

Hopefully I'll answer your question properly. Locking, unlocking.

When they go to lock up that locker, if the door is shut, we get that status updated and automatically turns this to being in the lock state. So we're updating that status constantly. If the door is not locked and they're when they go to end the transaction, most times we want that locker to be locked at the end of the transaction. When they hit this, we check the status of the lock and if that status of the lock is unlocked, a pop up comes up that says please shut the door. When they shut the door, we recheck the status of that door, it says it's locked and and then they can properly end that transaction. Does that kind of answer your question?

Yeah, he says yeah, makes sense. And Max asks another question. Is it going to be native or a web app?

Yeah, so we have this currently in the web app and also there's native options available as well. So depending on the use case.

There'S pros and cons to both. Obviously with native applications you can connect to Bluetooth devices much easier, but web applications you don't have that ability. But to answer your question, you can do both.

Awesome. Another quick one. What analytics do you get or See on the users, can you retarget them in marketing?

Yeah, absolutely. There's a handful of things that we have when it comes to, you know, Google Tag Manager and different things that are embedded into the app. You're also seeing if they sign in with their phone or email address, you can also, they, they fall into that user pool as well. So you can retarget them, you know, either exporting that information out and putting that into a email database or, you know, to do your email campaigns or you can even do those reminders directly into the software.

Yeah. And also Chun says we get many requests for a reservation system so that people can book a locker in advance. Just a comment.

Well, that brings me to my next. I guess we'd go to the next slide. So the, what we're now going to be releasing is a new product with Colony Reservations, allowing people to select a location, a drop off, a pickup and drop off time in the number of lockers that they're looking to, to rent. What's really powerful about this, guys, it enables with us being, you know, developing a platform for anybody, we've developed a ton of different rules that you'll see here that you can set up and customize these reservations and these transactions however you want. So allowing you to balance both reservations and what we would call, you know, walk up transactions, you can have both. You can select one or the other. You can also set buffer times. You know, one of the biggest things with lockers and reservations is what if those lockers are full when the next reservation starts? You can start monitoring those and set your own buffer times as well. So you can do that, you can embed these places to register and reserve these lockers directly into your website. You can do a variety of these different things that you see here on the screen. It's a very powerful tool. We've been working on this for some time and.

From a locker standpoint, it's going to be quite a game changer for people to reserve lockers, you know, in the future. Because I agree with you, whoever said that was if you're staying somewhere, if you're traveling, you're going to want to book that locker, you know, the night before or even maybe earlier that week to make sure that you have access to those lockers. When you have to check out of that Airbnb at 10am and your flights not till 8pm I just had, I was just in Europe and had that exact thing actually happen.

Where you have that.

You know, that gap where you don't want to lug you know, lug your luggage around. So you're definitely going to want to have that reservation. This is something that's been asked for for some time and we're now releasing this to some beta users and will be released by the end of the year.

Any questions regarding reservations?

Yeah, actually, what if a customer returns to the locker after their rental period has ended up? Not about the reservations, but yeah, yeah, good question.

So if they say that they're going to rent from 10am to 2pm and they go beyond that 2pm they're just going to be continually charged that that hourly or daily rate that is, that is attached to that device. So if it is $1 per hour and they go beyond that, you will be charged that. There's other options that will also be coming that allow people, allow you to charge penalties if they do beyond that as well, that you can increase that charge after, you know, if they go beyond whatever they initially reserved. But up until this point it's, you know, it just kicks in that, that rate that's attached to that device.

Yeah, I think we can continue for now.

Well, I wanted to wrap up with.

With that new product release and whoever mentioned that, thank you for the nice segue. I really appreciate that. Any other questions for me or Diana as we kind of wrap things up here? There's a lot of good engagement this time around.

Yeah, actually I left this one for the end. Ahmad asks, can you share insights on how to drive attention or awareness for such services with the region that such services still not available?

So let me. It was talking about drawing awareness for a particular locker deployment or are we talking more regarding a locker system that. Or selling these luggage lockers in a particular market? I guess if you can respond to that, the whole business model.

Yeah, it's a great question. So there's a lot of companies that are already storing, already storing luggage. Right. We're seeing that market play out. What I would recommend is checking out those marketplaces that I laid out earlier, whether it's Bounce or any of those other marketplaces for luggage and see which companies are hosts of those for those businesses in that marketplace in your area and reach out to them. Really what it comes down to is identifying their pain points and their pain point might be, hey, this business is going really, really well. But we don't have a way of expanding our business. We're just a small family owned retail store in Paris and we don't have a bunch of business so. Or we don't have a bunch of other locations. So selling that of expanding their business is one thing. There's quite a few, there's quite a few luggage companies out there as well that are doing this. And what we, where we've seen success is connecting with them and enabling them to reduce their costs, operational costs and expand their business pretty easily. Hopefully that kind of answers where you're looking for.

Yeah. Another question about reservations, Elmar asks how do you avoid double bookings with reservations and on site bookings?

Yeah, it's a good question. So.

It'S kind of a two pronged approach. One, you can enable the option for people have to reserve beforehand or you can have if you want to have reservations and on site bookings in the Settings tab you'll see that there are the ability for people to, you can set up rules when it comes to allow people to extend their reservations, yes or no, through a certain period of time. Calculating. There's another rule here. I kind of had to split this thing up.

So allowing the payment before or after the initial payment and then the buffer time, do you want so when someone's looking to return it, do you want them, do you want to have a buffer time of 30 minutes, 15 minutes, an hour. So that's one piece of it, Elmer. The other piece is going to be the utilization rates of your locker banks. So in the analytics tab in the dashboard, you're going to always want to make sure that if you're managing reservations plus walk up traffic, you're going to want to have a buffer. Right. If you have your highest peak days or let's say 50 transactions at a time, you're going to want to have 75 lockers available. You're going to want to give yourself a buffer. That is part of the complexity when it comes to reservations and lockers. You know, you obviously can't allow if they go past their, their time in, in their rental to just throw their luggage away. Like there's, you're, you're, you're kind of tied at that point. So those things, I would say it's a multi pronged approach and you really kind of have to manage it. But we give you the resources and the analytics to manage that properly.

Yeah. And Ahmad says just a comment. The challenging part is convincing potential customers to upgrade their current manual way of handling lugg into the locker option from zero capex to Capex model.

Yeah.

I, I would agree at times, Ahmed. That would be depending on their business. Right. It's not going to be, you know, every business that's currently doing luggage is going to want to to accommodate this, what I would say is probably going to be your top, you know, 20% of people that are really generating revenue from this and they want to expand their business.

I would say the lower 80% is probably, it's probably not an option for them. Specifically when talking about luggage, it really comes down to the pain points. We've also seen hotels right where their concierge and front desk they, they're balancing, taking luggage back and then also coming back in and checking other people in. And it's a time management standpoint, I would say.

You know, particularly here in the US One of the other pain points is the lack of.

Hiring pool, allowing, you know, having people in the, in the workforce to hire to actually do these jobs. That's another pain point. But the automation of it, you know, over time, especially for the top 20%, it should pencil out and make a lot of sense for them.

Yes, thanks. So if you have, I think we have few more minutes. If you have any more questions that we can still address. So if not a quick announcement. Okay, some people are typing but yeah, I'm going to make a quick announcement. We're going to have our next webinar on December and we'll announce the topic topic soon. So yeah, just wanted to know. We're gonna send you another invite so hopefully we can meet one more time. Thanks Ahmad.

Thank you guys.

Okay, yes, thanks everybody for the engagement. I really appreciate it. And again you'll be getting a copy of this presentation so share it away with people. You know, we want people to see the platform we've built and also allow them to see, you know, this business model as well. So please reach out to us for any follow up meetings. Ghana and I are able to schedule a call whenever is best for you and yeah, we hope that this was informative.

Yeah, thank you guys.

Thank you. Bye.