Not Just Any Old Warehouse

It wasn’t enough for Ricky Choi, the co-founder of the clothing company Nice Laundry, to make high-quality socks, underwear and lounge attire. He wanted to deliver those goods in sturdy, chic packages, something his customers would appreciate and remember.

In its first years, Nice Laundry, a direct-to-consumer brand, hired a third-party warehouse and shipped its socks in a simple drawstring bag. Then Mr. Choi and his partners hit on the idea of sending customers an array of socks in an attractive container. A shopper could choose, say, 18 different socks from the company website and “build a box.”

A fine idea, in theory. But to meet the standards Mr. Choi and his team had in mind, a warehouse worker would have had to select from 300 sock styles before packing up the assortments ordered by Nice Laundry’s customers. The facility turned down the business, noting it would have had to reconfigure its entire operation to pull off such a task.

So Mr. Choi decided to build a new kind of warehouse.

Ricky Choi, the chief executive officer of Outerspace, at the firm’s warehouse in New Jersey.Credit…Graham Dickie/The New York Times

He rented a 1,500-square-foot storage unit in Paterson, N.J., and removed the walls. He and his employees reported there each morning, rather than to an office.