April 09, 2026
Provided image/The Story Factory
The Story Factory received a designation from the Pennsylvania Film Office that offers crews a tax incentive of up to 30%. Facilities need at least one soundstage with unobstructed floor space to meet the criteria.
Ashlee Hollis knows that creative people make creative requests. The marketing executive remembers, with a sigh and a laugh, a client who once asked her for 700 pounds of ice for a launch event. Like most city residents, Hollis didn't have a machine big enough to spit out a grand piano's worth of ice. But after a series of frantic calls, she found a guy in South Philly who drove the goods over to Hollis's production facility at 5th and Oxford streets the morning of the event.
That production facility is the Story Factory. With over 12,000 square feet of space, numerous studios and its own private loading dock, it's capable of turning all kinds of outlandish ideas into reality. Open since 2022, the Story Factory recently received a qualified production facility designation from the Pennsylvania Film Office. That entitles anyone who uses the site to an up to 30% tax credit, and makes the Story Factory the only space of its kind within Philadelphia city limits.
Landing this coveted accreditation was surprisingly easy. As Hollis tells it, she sought out QPF status in the fall at the urging of contacts within the Greater Philadelphia Film Office. Facilities must have at least one soundstage with unobstructed floor space and hit at least three other standards from a list of nine to meet the state's criteria. (A built-in power supply that can provide a minimum of 4,000 amps per sound stage without supplemental generators is one example.) But the Story Factory didn't need any upgrades or modifications to clear them; the building's previous tenant, Philadelphia Sound Stages, helped out significantly.
"All the walls and everything are intact, they were before we ever took it over, so we didn't have to do structural work," Hollis said. "And when we found this space with the power grid it has, we were like, OK, we could totally do something here.
"In the production world, finding power is amazing and very rare. We always are blowing circuits places."
Hollis had originally sought out the space to suit the needs of her clients at Helm Creative Studio, the agency she founded in 2015. A few times a week, the studio will use the Story Factory to film commercials, snap headshots or record podcast interviews. It's also a daily storage and shipping hub for mailing campaigns and merchandise, and where Hollis's husband, Elijah, hosts Sunday service for his ministry Change Church. (The couple work together in many capacities; Elijah is the "chief storyteller" for Helm and Hollis is a pastor for the church.)
"Every day's a new story, a new person," Hollis said. "We love it."
Now, with the QPF designation, she's hoping to scale up. Hollis envisions the Story Factory as a potential base of operations for television and movie crews coming into Philadelphia for production. In addition to the sound stage and studios, the facility has a suite of small offices on its top floor, each one nestled inside a tiny house. These homes are built on a yard of sorts — namely, a space covered in faux grass where Hollis hopes to install ping-pong tables and sofas. There's already a coffee cart for teams working out of the offices, but a larger cafe for craft services is located on the ground level.
The Story Factory has a 14-foot access door with a private loading dock on Oxford Street.
The Story Factory is positioning itself as a premiere production destination at an opportune time. HBO, AppleTV+ and Netflix have all shot in the city over the past two years — and at least one of them is poised to come back for Season 2 of "Task." Their crews have traditionally had to rely on facilities in Lancaster to suit their needs, but Pennsylvania's small list of qualified production facilities has recently swelled. Sun Center Studios, a site in Chester Township, got its QPF designation just a month before the Story Factory.
Hollis, who's preparing to host an open house for the production community in May, thinks Philadelphia can be even more than a stopover for entertainment giants parachuting in from New York or Los Angeles. With the right level of support, it can be an industry leader in its own right.
"Philadelphia already is a creative city and it already has this gritty building kind of feel," she said. "So to think what will that grit and what will that creativity spur on and create in the production world? I think we'll see it a lot in the next three to five years."
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