There’s a woman who comes into the office every other Tuesday morning around half eight, drops off two black IKEA bags of folded kaftans, picks up four cardboard boxes of new stock from her unit, and is back out the door by quarter past. She runs a beachwear and resort-wear label that’s stocked in three hotel boutiques on the island, one in Bophut, one in Chaweng, one in Lamai, and our unit is her warehouse. Has been since 2018. She’s never had a shop-front of her own and doesn’t plan to.
She started with one boutique back then, in a small Bophut hotel that asked her to supply when their original supplier closed up. Twenty pieces a month. She designed everything in her head, sourced fabric from a place in Pratunam she’d known since university, and had it made up at a small workshop in Khlong San by a woman who’d worked in the rag trade for thirty years. The first batches she brought down on the train herself in two suitcases, hand-luggage size, paid the BTS fare to the Eastern Bus Terminal because the air-conditioned coach was cheaper than the airline baggage fees would have been.
When the second boutique came on, Chaweng, three times the volume, she needed somewhere to keep the stock. Her condo in Bangrak couldn’t fit it. Her Bangkok cousin’s spare room couldn’t either. A friend mentioned us. She came in for a small unit, took a medium when she saw the prices, and worked out that the difference between renting a unit on Samui versus warehousing in Bangkok and shipping piecemeal was about 40,000 baht a month in her favour, even before the courier costs were factored in.
The setup she’s got now is a medium unit racked floor to ceiling, every piece tagged with the boutique name and the size code. New stock comes in by sea-freight from Bangkok four times a year in big plastic crates that we help her unload off the truck. She does the rotation herself, we don’t touch her stock at any point. She’s there every fortnight on Tuesday morning. Brings me a coffee from a place near her condo most weeks.
She also stores all the boutique kit between seasons. Mannequins, the fitted-out display rails, the seasonal signage, packing materials, even the white folding chairs the Bophut hotel uses for its seasonal trunk shows. The Bophut boutique gets rebuilt every September after the low-season finishes, and all of that kit comes to us in August, sits for six weeks, goes back in mid-October.
The closest she’s come to a real problem in seven years was a freak storm in November 2023 that flooded the Lamai boutique overnight. Most of the floor stock was ruined. She got a call from the hotel manager around eleven at night. Drove from her condo, met me at the office at one in the morning, opened her unit, loaded two cases of replacement stock into her car, drove to Lamai, and had the boutique looking more or less normal by the time the first guests came down for breakfast. She told me afterwards that having the unit was the difference between losing one day of trading and losing a week. The hotel apologised, refunded her storage costs for the flooded items, and renewed her supply contract for two more years.
She’s not unusual. There’s a wedding florist in Hua Thanon who keeps a few hundred glass vases, three timber arches, and several thousand metres of fairy lights in a unit with us between events, only deals with the stock for two days before each ceremony, and pays less in storage rent over an entire year than she would in three months of a Chaweng shop-front. A drone photographer who stores his entire kit and a backup body when he’s working off-island, which is most of the year. A pop-up market vendor who does Fisherman’s Village walking street on Friday nights, the Lamai night market on Sundays, and an artisan fair in Nathon once a month, keeps three folding tables and his entire stock of leather goods sourced out of Chiang Mai in a small unit, and treats us as effectively his shop-back-office.
The kaftan customer is looking at a fourth boutique now. A new hotel just down from the Plai Laem viewpoint, opening for high season. She came in last week to talk through whether her current unit would still work or if she needed the next size up. We worked it out on the back of an envelope. The next size adds about 1,800 baht a month. The fourth boutique, on her existing margins, will pay for itself in roughly eleven days of trading.
What I’d Tell You If You’re Running Something Small
First thing: warehousing is a fixed cost, and on this island most small businesses can’t afford much in fixed costs. A shop-front stockroom in Chaweng runs somewhere between 25,000 and 80,000 baht a month depending on size and which side of the road. A medium storage unit is more like 5,000 to 6,000. If your business runs on margins under 50% on goods turnover, that gap matters. The trick is being honest about whether you actually need daily access. Most don’t.
Second thing, and this is where I disagree with the standard advice: don’t take on dedicated warehousing just because your revenue crossed some arbitrary threshold. The thinking goes that real businesses need real warehouses with their own roller doors and offices and a sign on the building. That’s true for fast-moving businesses with multiple staff handling stock daily. For a one-person operation that rotates stock weekly or fortnightly, a storage unit is genuinely the right answer, and stays the right answer for a long time. I have customers who’ve been operating out of units for ten-plus years. The ones who scaled up scaled by adding boutique relationships and supplier contracts, not by adding warehouse infrastructure they didn’t need.
Third thing: combine storage with removals if you do big seasonal moves. The kaftan customer doesn’t need this because she carries her own stock to the boutiques in two bags at a time. Wedding suppliers and event-rental businesses often do, though. Their entire setup gets moved to a venue, sits there for two days, comes back. Trying to coordinate that around the actual event work without help is a nightmare. Most of them eventually give up and let us handle the move both ways while they handle the event.
She’ll be in next Tuesday morning, around half eight. The new stock from Bangkok arrived yesterday, two crates, mostly the new season’s kaftans and a small run of resort dresses for the Lamai boutique. We’ll probably end up talking through unit sizes again before she signs the lease on the fourth shop. Our Samui storage handles a dozen of these arrangements at any given time. None of them have ever wanted a proper warehouse. None of them have needed one.
