Australia avoided the worst impact of the GFC, which hit America particularly hard in later 2007 and 2008 – but we probably had a hang-over into the first few years of the next decade.
Despite the gloom and doom, we felt incredibly positive about the future of the locksmithing and security industries generally. In August 2009 I received the business case from our team to launch a “showbus”, and I approved it and we got it set up in record time, and launched in early 2010. The showbus was loaded with key cutting machines, tools, displays and so-on, and we’ve got photos of it travelling right around the country to customers in every corner.
By late 2010 we’d completely outgrown our home of 25 years at Dryburgh Street in North Melbourne.
I remember we had rented a few small factories in the streets behind us for overflow, and it was often like an episode of “The Castle”, where we had to move 5 pallets out onto the footpath in order to have space to move a pallet out of the way of some racking to get to a pallet of stock we needed. It was time to look for a new home, somewhere that would allow us to grow and continue to serve customers right across the country.
We purchased a plot of land in Brooklyn, in Melbourne’s inner west, and commenced construction soon after.
We opened our new distribution centre in 2012, having custom built the facility to suit warehousing, production, customisation, and to provide facilities for training and education.
Initially our idea was to use the facility for branch replenishments, but quite quickly we started shipping orders all over the country to customers in every state.
We moved the coining machines there, and also initiated laser etching of padlocks and cylinders – allowing customers very fast & dynamic product personalisation.
We had space to move ADI production into a dedicated facility there, allowing us to properly resource and service the brand.
With the added space, we were able to improve our supply rate of products – space had been so constrained at North Melbourne some days we just weren’t able to move the orders through quickly enough.
The 2010’s were also the time of the rise of the internet for functional tasks like online ordering. While LSC had been an early mover onto the web in the late 1990’s, and we’d had a high quality online catalogue since 2002, by 2012 we were onto our second iteration of “shop online” with a new web platform. This allowed customers to see pricing, stock levels, some order history and access more and more product information 24x7/365.
By 2015 our Technical Education offering (TechEd) was formalised, and we launched with a range of high quality, dedicated courses – initially focusing on Automotive topics, but soon expanding to electronic security. The courses were high quality, theoretical, and not necessarily tied to our brands (although they did feature prominently of course).
In January 2016 we launched the industries first dedicated automotive technical resource for transponders: CarLab. It was developed completely in-house, and the idea was to provide high quality, Australian market specific, accurate information about vehicle immobiliser programming covering keys, software, chips, remotes, and all kinds of tips and tricks including photos and videos.
In 2017 we celebrated 40 years of partnership with Silca, and ran a promotion which brought winners to see their factory in northern Italy.
We celebrated 20 years partnership with ABUS in 2019, and hosted a large number of customers for a VIP dinner and experience in Melbourne.
The decade had been a huge one of growth, and set us up for the next chapter.
Mark Johnson