Harbor Lockers, a subsidiary of Sacramento smart locker manufacturer Luxer One, plans to deploy 25,000 of its public lockers nationwide, and let other companies and developers decide how to use them.
Over 15 years, Luxer One has deployed more than 8,500 private lockers in apartment buildings, offices and Home Depot (NYSE: HD) stores for remote pickup.
Luxer is now publicly testing its Harbor and DropLocker public locker systems in Sacramento and Chico, part of a network that will become a nationwide network over time, said Josh Middlebrooks, president of Luxer One.
“We aren’t doing any specific use case,” he said.
The idea was hatched during the pandemic, when many use cases for remote lockers occurred at schools, libraries and other places.
Those uses continue, and have expanded, Middlebrooks said.
“A lot of professionals have given up office space,” he said, as an example. For accountants or attorneys who need signatures on documents, they can drop paperwork off at a time convenient to them, and then the client can pick it up when convenient for the client, without either side going to the other person’s home.
“It’s an asynchronous handoff,” Middlebrooks said, adding that the locker network "gives online sellers a storefront."
The public lockers are operated by a smartphone app and allow for delivery, storage and pickup of items around the clock, seven days a week in public places.
So far, the biggest use cases in Chico and Sacramento have been drops for Airbnb (Nasdaq: ABNB) keys, document sharing, and physical pickups from sales on Facebook marketplace, he said.
Another big use is storage. A DropLocker at Downtown Commons near Golden 1 Center allows people to store jackets or other items they don’t want to carry around, or perhaps that they cannot take into the arena.
“We can take anything, but we are not interested in being the biggest bag storage company,” Middlebrooks said. “We are inviting entrepreneurs and software developers to build a use case to ship directly to these lockers."
The company is working with a major delivery operation that it declined to identify to use Harbor as its lockers for last-mile delivery to cut down on porch piracy. Once Harbor builds out its network, it should have a public locker within a half-mile of most people in the 40 major markets in the country, Middlebrooks said.
To paraphrase Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, Middlebrooks says the best way to scale up a business is to do things that don’t scale at first. Then concentrate on getting a lot of customer feedback and response. Then make the experience awesome, Middlebrooks said.
Harbor has placed eight lockers in Chico, and it's deploying about 200 of them in Sacramento for use by potential customers.
Potential uses can include package pickup, food pickup, product giveaways, event bag storage, peer-to-peer exchange and other uses.
Luxer One was founded in 2014 in San Francisco. It moved to Sacramento in 2016, with its current headquarters located off Power Inn Road near Fruitridge Road.
Giant Swedish lock company Assa Abloy Group acquired Luxer One at the end of 2018. Based in Stockholm, Assa Abloy is the world’s largest lock manufacturer. It provides technology associated with “door opening solutions” for residential, institutional, hotel and electromechanical functions. The Assa Abloy family of brands includes August, Yale, HID, Medeco, Emtek and Adams Rite.
