Entrepreneur has combined commercial success with clothing the homeless in Manchester

Rick Chebrika, aged 30, of the Monthly Tee Club, started a t-shirt printing business from his garage two years ago.

He now caters to a thriving online community of t-shirt lovers from his self storage units in Altrincham by day and delivers the goods to the less fortunate by night.

Said Rick: “The Monthly Tee Club is not your average business, focused exclusively on profit.

"Instead, our main driver is to establish a global network of people who want to express their individuality while doing some good in the world. We like to think that we are providing a model for businesses of the future whereby they can satisfy their profit requirements while also engaging with their local community in a meaningful way.”

He added: “As a start-up business, we were reluctant to take on an inflexible and costly office lease. Instead, we decided to make the move into self storage. Now, we sign, seal and deliver all of our bespoke t-shirts from the comfort of our two units at Smart Storage in Altrincham.”

He said it is a little known fact that the UK’s burgeoning online retail market owes much to the simultaneous growth in the self storage industry.

Now worth in excess of £440 million, it is estimated that up to 20 per cent of all 605,000 storage units in the UK are home to successful online retailers, according to industry body, the Self Storage Association.

These retailers make a significant contribution to the forecasted £77 billion worth of online sales being delivered to homes around Britain this year. That is more than Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and Poland put together.