Securing an enduring family legacy of trust, safety and excellence

“If you don’t innovate, you will evaporate”.” - Mr Loon

The LOON Lock story is a story about family and resillience. Today, our brand represents trust, security and longevity -- promising the best for your closest kin. But also, our very conception are firmly rooted in family. 

The beginning of a family legacy

While we launched fairly recently in May 2018, the business is in fact a culmination of our father’s life’s work: family and product design.

Our father, the 68-year-old inventor of LOON Lock, is a veteran product designer. He had spent three decades designing successful patented products for companies from behind the scenes, before finally putting his name on an invention for the first time when he launched The LOON Lock in 2018.

The driving force behind this? Family. 

Our father always worked hard to make sure he could put food on the table, driven by the mantra that “family comes first”. Now in his retirement, he is determined to create a lasting legacy that will continue sustaining the Loon family for generations to come.

This legacy began to take shape one Chinese New Year. As part of a house painting exercise, his role was to paint the front gate. Back then, the family had been using a standard padlock for HDB gates, which had to be lifted and held to work.This proved to be a larger inconvenience than usual, as using the lock meant knocking fresh paint off the gate.

And so, by the end of Chinese New Year in 2017  the idea for a new and improved HDB padlock was born.

A labour of love

From then on, it was all hands on deck for the Loon family. Creating the first LOON Lock was an arduous journey. But the path was never lonely, and working together only reinforced our commitment to bettering the lives of other families in our community. It was as if we each had a hand in chiseling the finest details onto what is today aptly named The LOON Lock.

Over the course of two years, my father spent many sleepless nights creating and finetuning an improved padlock design that would be safer and easier to use. The result was a padlock made to be easily used with just one hand, that safely releases the key only when in lock position, and that can last a lifetime.

But soon came the uphill task of finding a manufacturer that would take our small order of 1,000 locks. Our search took us from one city in China to another on long train rides. And on one particularly memorable trip to Guangzhou, we were trapped in the city for days beyond our scheduled departure due to an incoming typhoon. Thankfully, our perseverance (and our father’s relentlessly persuasive ways) eventually paid off when a manufacturer agreed to cast moulds for our first batch of locks.

We recall the small but significant moments in building a reliable business committed to serving our community. In the early days of humble endeavour, we would hop on bicycles, cycling behind our elderly father to install LOON Locks for customers.

We continue to operate as a small but well-oiled family business to this day. The Loon daughter Michelle drives business development and strategy, while the Loon son Kelvin does on-demand installation and operations (thankfully no longer on bikes). And needless to say, our father, even at age 68, continues putting his design brains to work, and is now developing a digital lock.

The Loon commitment to your families

We started this brand story by saying that LOON Lock is all about family. Indeed, the brand was created for the Loon family, and is today tirelessly run by the family, for your family.

It is our honor to have brought about a new standard for safe and fuss-free HDB padlocks. As a family business, we understand and value the needs of the silver generation. Padlocks remain the preferred way of securing homes for many of us. Yet, the typical HDB padlocks are far from ideal, especially for our seniors. These locks need to be operated with two hands, forcing  users to have to set down shopping bags or clutch their belongings uncomfortably under the arm. And when the padlock finally opens, the rod can easily get caught on the gate, another hassle to work around. 

The LOON Lock promise is to keep ridding families of the unneeded, and sometimes painful, daily inconveniences. With every happy customer we serve, we grow more steadfast in our mission of bettering the lives of families. 

Within our first four months of business, homegrown retail chain store SELFFIX DIY, hardware city & other individual hardware shop owners have picked up our product and we are now retailing at their stores islandwide. We will continue to create more touch points to reach you, our customer, in the form of our online store and on e-commerce platforms such as Lazada, Qoo10, Shopee, Carousell, and many more in time to come. And hopefully soon, we will be greeting you at your nearest neighborhood hardware store.

Beyond the first generation of LOON Lock for HDB gates, we are moving into our next phase of applying the Loon standard of excellence to digital locks to serve more families.

LOON  Lock represents our father’s hopes to create a legacy that will transcend his lifetime. The patent-pending invention means the Loon name would forever be etched in brass, remembered by all the families that it has served and will continue to benefit future generations.

Our brand story will not be complete without a shout-out to all our customers who  have supported us since we  started this humble business in May 2018. 

Your trust and acknowledgement are our greatest motivation to  continue to innovate. 

Now, we are all one LOON Lock family, bound by our commitment to those that matter most.