Chic and Sleek, It’s Hugg & Hall Mobile Storage To The Rescue

“You’d be surprised how many people need extra storage space.”

With that thought in mind Jim Hugg, an architect by training, started his mobile storage business with his father 18 years ago. Now Hugg & Hall Mobile Storage based in Little Rock, has a sprawling client base that covers all of Arkansas and has spread into surrounding states. In fact, Hugg says, “This year we’ll do about $3.5 million in sales, total revenue.”

That total revenue combines sales and rental of extremely rugged maritime shipping containers that Hugg & Hall Mobile Storage now uses exclusively. As president, Hugg runs the company from an ultra-modern, ultra-green complex in southwest Little Rock that they moved into about a year ago. And he designed the building out of his own product… those same shipping containers.

When Hugg and his father, Charles, started their mobile storage business the product was very different. Charles Hugg had sold his very successful Hugg and Hall Equipment Company to his other son, John, and to his son-in-law, Robert Hall. Charles had established a lucrative regional business selling and renting industrial and construction equipment. After several acquisitions, Hugg & Hall Equipment grew even larger, but its bread-and-butter was specializing in the daily, weekly, and monthly rental of its equipment.

Charles Hugg knew the rental business and was lured to the possibilities of a new venture. Jim left his architectural firm and his dad came out of retirement and together in 1995 they started Hugg & Hall Mobile Storage Systems. In the beginning, they became a franchise for Mobile Mini and rented that company’s container product.

For some time, the storage business operated side-by-side with Hugg & Hall Equipment, utilizing an overlap of facilities, trucking capacity, and marketing efforts. Jim Hugg says they weren’t interested in residential, but rather “established contractors, sub-contractors, anything to do with construction, or industrial” as their core customers.

“You know we do a lot of rentals to paper plants, mills, manufacturing facilities for temporary storage needs or even long term storage needs they have. We rent to a lot of retailers, like Wal-Mart and K-Mart. They have a lot of lay-away needs, a lot of seasonal inventory storage needs that we provide containers for. Academics, churches, automotive dealerships, it’s a pretty wide-spread market. But construction, retail, and industrial are our core business. We really like business-to-business,” Hugg said.

Still holding his architecture license, Hugg was designing new facilities for Hugg & Hall Equipment as it expanded while helping run his own company and would attend national architecture conventions to learn more about what was going on in the industry. It was there he made the discovery that would change the course of his mobile storage business.

“So I go to these AIA conventions and I see these architects from California and the east coast and they were building projects out of shipping containers. And they were talking about the green aspect of these things. These things have a life as maritime shipping container, then they are retired and there is a huge supply of them. So these guys got creative and said this is a great construction module. It’s 8 feet wide, and either 20 or 40 feet long, and 8.5 feet tall and extremely structurally sound. So they started modifying the containers and it’s a green aspect because we are recycling the container itself.”

Manufactured in China, the containers are usually purchased by leasing companies who get them loaded for end-users and hire shipping lines to carry their contents across the ocean. Hugg says once the ships arrive at ports, the containers are typically stacked on trains and transported to various destinations around the country. Once retired, they go to depot storage yards. Hugg & Hall Mobile Storage buys used containers from a yard in Memphis.

The containers are made out of heavy-duty gauge steel and are wind and water tight. Floors in a 40 foot container have a 60,000 pound capacity with an asphalt undercoating making them perfect for not only storage, but for portable field offices at industrial sites.

“So in ’03 we started converting the containers into office units, job-site office units. We put a door in there, we put in air conditioning, we insulate them, we run phone , data, lights and put planning tables in there, and boom…now these guys can get the office unit from us they need to work out of,” Hugg said.

He says now his company has a vendor in China that sells him new units for almost what the used ones cost that are already painted. They have doors on both ends and a high-security locking system.

Besides the home office in Little Rock, Hugg & Hall Mobile Storage has locations in El Dorado, Ft. Smith, Springdale and recently bought out another company for its newest location in Hoxie, near Walnut Ridge.

“We probably purchase about three-to-four hundred containers a year and over the last few years we’ve been adding approximately 200 containers to our rental fleet and about 50 of those are office units. So our standing rental fleet today is about 1,500 containers, but then we are also selling about 150 containers a year,” he said.

When you pull into the Hugg & Hall Mobile Storage yard, you can’t miss them. Giant shipping containers stacked on top of each other as part of that inventory. Another thing that catches your eye is the office complex and shop made from those same containers. Sleek and modern with a sheik industrial look, they’re topped-off with wood decks and overhangs. Hugg designed his office building and has big plans for marketing future container buildings.

“We have a lot of interest. We have more and more people who tour our facility and they go, ‘Wow this is a shipping container? We would like to see if there’s a way you could design us a fishing cabin or a hunting club, or a little place on the lake.’ So there’s a market for secure, modern design. Something that can be portable and delivered to the site and set-up.”

Hugg says he is in the stages of developing a 450 sq. ft. prototype that he plans to roll out this fall. “We think it’s something we know the banks will support because it’s a lot more structurally sound than a mobile home system. This thing is going to be anchored down and be able to weather severe storms,” he said.

Weathering severe storms and tornadoes is the purpose of another of the company’s innovative designs utilizing shipping containers. The storm shelter product is called Storm Box and Hugg says it’s been tested at Texas Tech’s wind testing institute to withstand an F5 rated tornado. He says it has FEMA-rated doors and a locking system with a concrete and bolt anchoring system designed by structural engineers. Storm Box, also scheduled to be introduced this fall, will be an above-ground community storm shelter that Hugg says is an economical product with unlimited marketing potential, including schools.

Along with the storm shelters, Hugg sees great potential for his shipping container products in Arkansas’ natural gas industry and with the military. He says he already does a lot of business with the Ft. Chaffee Maneuver Training Center where his containers are used to build mock villages.

“We’re growing 15 to 20 percent a year, that’s been our track for the past 5 or 10 years.”

Editor’s note:  This story appears in the latest magazine issue of Talk Business Arkansas, which you can read online at this link.