by Eva Shaw-Gill
DeAnthony Pierce and Benjamin Fitzgerald were walking through New York City carrying a heavy load of books when they thought, there had to be a better way. Why wasn’t there a place they could lay down their load and enjoy their visit without worrying about whether their things would be there when they returned? A conveniently located storage locker would have been perfect, but there wasn’t one available.
Pierce pitched the idea at an event called “Startup Weekend” in Roanoke where he met Navarre Bartz. Several months later they started working on how to bring convenient storage solutions to the masses. Using customer discovery techniques learned at the conference, they were able to eke out what was important in storage for people on the move.
“We were trying to put lockers in places like Malls,” said Pierce. Almost a year later we started focusing on courthouses when we discovered people also had no place to put their cellphones. People arriving to the courthouses by way of public transportation could not return to their vehicle to store their phone.
As the business took off, the demand grew for their storage lockers in Malls and Courthouses, not only in Virginia but throughout other states as well, which added new team member Benjamin Fitzgerald. You can find a PacMül locker in the entrance of the Roanoke City Courthouse.
PacMül’s mission is to bring storage to the places you need it most so you can go on with your day and don’t have to fret about whether your things will be there when you return.
DeAnthony Pierce a Roanoke native and William Fleming graduate, Air Force Veteran, Certificate of Entrepreneurship & A.A.S. Business Management – Virginia Western
Navarre Bartz (B.S. Ceramic Engineering – Missouri S&T, M.Eng. Materials Science and Engineering – Virginia Tech)
Benjamin Fitzgerald also a Roanoke native and William Fleming graduate joined the PacMül team, (A.S. Business Administration – Virginia Western, B.S. Information Systems – Virginia Commonwealth)
