In July, smart start of b2b access Latch announced a partnership with the Jet.com e-commerce platform to install 1,000 of its smart locks on residential buildings in New York . It is now announced the first "secure, unattended deliveries" activated by the facilities.
Co-founder, Luke Schoenfelder, writes in the usual post that Latch's unattended deliveries began on Monday – and are currently available to "thousands" of New Yorkers (though the facilities attached to this partnership are still going on, so it is not yet finished the full lot).
"Thousands of people in New York can order anything they want from our partners online and know that they can go home without fear of theft, bad weather or the dreaded" Sorry to have missed "door tag", says Schoenfelder.
"While this may sound like a simple idea, the execution of this user experience has been surprisingly complex – it took us just over four years to refine and update this experience for customers, homeowners and homeowners. Buildings and partners, including countless hours of product research, hundreds of people and millions of dollars in development.
Some of these Latch development dollars were spent on partial financing facilities for smart lock hardware. And it is clear that he hopes the product will go to work to promote the benefits of smart access in order to convince more building owners to sign up.
When it comes to smart locks, it has always seemed difficult for consumers to target startups in the space to convince masses of individuals to manage the risks and complexity of a home. smart padlock installation in their own home. (See: August Home selling to a giant veteran lock earlier this month, for example.) And indeed, those who live in rented dwellings or apartment buildings do not even have the option to exchange traditional locks themselves.
Latch's b2b positioning bypasses this problem. Although that means that the company still has the challenge of convincing building owners to upgrade a key infrastructure that they might be happy to leave unchanged for years.
Hence his strategy of partially funding some facilities himself to try to convince thousands of tenants of the benefits of unsupervised deliveries – and to generate market pressures for locks to be installed by the companies. owners. That this approach is hopeful, Latch is just beginning.
"This is only the beginning," writes Schoenfelder, sketching out his broader disruptive hopes. "We believe that these new delivery capabilities will create a fundamental shift in consumer buying behavior, where people order more and more products in their urban building (and their suburbs) without ever going to a store. "
The big ambition of the start-up to move even more online shopping business also involves some risks, as shown by the reaction against the messaging of a start-up like Bodega. Add to that, when your target customers are building owners, they may also be in the real estate rental business to commercial clients too (who may not be happy from the prospect of a decline of attendance at their physical stores …
How Latch manages to snatch all these variously tense yarns will be interesting to watch. Until now, the startup founded in 2014 has not broken down the overall sales metrics for its various smart access products. When / if this is the case, will be the key.