Reliability is everything, our customers insist upon it, says David Ogden, Founder of The Key Safe Company.

It’s getting close to 30 years since Ogden first spotted a key safe in a car showroom in Worcestershire and saw the potential for a business.

Ever since that moment in 1996, The Key Safe Company has set about being a disrupter in the marketplace.

SJUK caught up with Ogden to ask what makes his company’s mechanical key safes different in the market, why his products are so closely aligned to the customer and how he plans to shake up the security market.

When you started The Key Safe Company, the automotive industry appeared to be your most likely bedfellow, how did your business become so transformational in social care?

The performance and reliability of our police preferred key safes makes them the perfect point-of-use solution for properties and dwellings in virtually every sector.

But, our products have grown to become household names in the social care sector.

We’ve positively disrupted domiciliary care, where our key safes have revolutionised the way care givers, local authorities and medical professionals gain access to the homes of those in need of care in the UK and Europe.

Our products save lives, time and money, by freeing up much-needed hospital beds and NHS resources.

Having keys stored at the point of need in our secure, easy-to-access key safe has meant that care can continue in the comfort of people’s homes, with carers and emergency services able to gain access 24/7.

How do you intend to disrupt the security market?

Disruption, for us as a team, is about listening to the needs of our customers and using that insight to innovate, creating solutions to their problems.

The team at Key Safe has worked with the traditional keyholding, security and void property markets since our inception.

We continuously speak with the companies that provide an essential service, holding keys for businesses across the country and responding to alarms and emergencies outside regular business hours.

Currently, this system relies on mobile units, equipped to securely house these keys.

When an alarm is triggered, a security officer drives to the location, assesses the situation and resolves the issue. However, this set-up can be fraught with inefficiencies and risks.

Multiple alarms can occur simultaneously in different parts of the service area.

If the keys needed for an emergency are in a vehicle miles away from the alarm site, it will result in delays and potential breaches of service agreements.

Ensuring that key holding companies can respond quickly is not only part of the service level agreement between them and their customers, but also crucial in ensuring they adhere to compliance standards.

Our Tamo and Tamo Pro mechanical key safes are the absolute result of customer input and offer a reliable, customer-driven solution to this clear problem in the security industry, at a volume price point to match, which was previously missing from within this industry.

What makes you feel so passionately about mechanical key safes?

I still see mechanical products that I fitted 25 years ago, in excellent working order. That says to me; ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it’.

Reliability is everything, our customers insist upon it. If they are involved in a life-or-death situation, our products must work, there is no compromise – we have to keep it simple.

People don’t want to change batteries or have to monitor their products. They want something that will simply do the job – that’s why we’re mechanical.

Our new Tamo Pro has achieved the LPS1175: Issue 8 B1 accreditation from the third-party Loss Prevention Certification Board (LPCB) making it the most secure mechanical key safe in the world – and it’s this mechanical technology that makes it so robust, and is why our customers categorise our products as life critical.

Our knowledge and experience in developing mechanical products over the years, has meant that our engineering team were able to develop a unique patented ‘multi-push’ mechanism, allowing each button in the key safe to be pushed up to four times.

This technology means that instead of a possible 4,096 code combinations (the standard on a push-button key safe), Tamo Pro allows for over 9.7million – equal to any electronic product.

How has customer feedback influenced your latest product developments?

We have a new feature on our Tamo and Tamo Pro called KiCall. This is a trademarked QR code on each product that allows registered users to access the code for that safe.

It also records the audit trail of visits.

This product has been specifically developed for the key holder response market, especially for organisations with thousands of keys that are stored in security centres, vans and sites across the country.

KiCall enables us to store the blueprint of a building behind a QR code on the key safe, as well as other vital information at the point of need.

This might be access information, site maps or PDFs that form part of sign off on site health and safety or construction compliance.

In the care world, KiCall is used by medical professionals to access their medical information platforms in a controlled way. In property rental, users can put a plethora of useful tourist information behind that QR code.

That’s going to resonate with customers over time. Storing vital information, as well as keys, at the point of need is very much a USP for us.

Would you like to see an industry standard that all key safe manufacturers and suppliers should adhere to?

100%, yes. When I turned up to test our first police preferred key safe 15 years ago, there wasn’t the right facility available to do so. Because we were storing a front door key, we knew we needed to bring the key safe up to, or above, a front door standard.

I’ve led the charge from day one, being the first person to build, design, engineer and deliver the first police preferred key safe, our Supra C500 Pro, through Secured by Design, the UK’s police’s official home security initiative.

In this environment, especially with vulnerable adults at home, I would like to get this legislatively driven.

I believe it should be standardised so that it’s the norm for key safes to have achieved a particular certification.

That’s why we deliver the best products we possibly can. These standards are so important in making it clear to consumers just how vital it is they choose a key safe that complies to a minimum standard.

We’re incredibly confident in the durability of our key safes. To prove this, we’ve signed our Tamo Pro up for rigorous attack testing at the International Security Expo (ISE) at London’s Olympia.

The Key Safe Company’s Stand number at ISE is C143. The Tamo Pro key safe will go under the spotlight at the LPCB Live Testing Lab, in the Perimeter Protection Zone, from 3.30pm on Tuesday, September 24 and 12:20pm on Wednesday, 25th September.

This article was originally published in the September Edition of Security Journal UK. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.