Master Lock

American lock company

Master Lock is an American company that develops padlocks, combination locks, safes, and related security products. Now a subsidiary of Fortune Brands Innovations, Master Lock Company LLC was formed in 1921 by locksmith inventor Harry E. Soref and is headquartered in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. He tried unsuccessfully to get some large companies interested in using his design, so he and two friends—P. E. Yolles and Sam Stahl,—worked together to found the Master Lock company in Milwaukee in 1921 to produce the locks themselves, initially with five employees. However, the brand had not yet reached its peak status as a familiar consumer brand at the time of Soref's death. Later, Master would incorporate the image into a one second long blipvert commercial in 1998. At its peak in the early 1990s, the company employed about 1,300 workers in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. In 1993, the company began moving much of its manufacturing to China, and later also moved some manufacturing to Mexico. Master Lock requested that the designer locks be stocked in departments outside the hardware section of retailers. In 2003, the company acquired Illinois based American Lock and all their intellectual and material property. In 2010, Master Lock began offering a password manager service called Master Lock Vault that includes a web site and associated software applications for use on various devices. In 2011 Fortune Brands spun off Master Lock as part of Fortune Brands Home & Security. In January 2011, it was announced that about 36 jobs were being returned from China to the Milwaukee plant, which would increase the number of positions at the plant to 379. In February 2012, U. S. President Barack Obama visited the Master Lock headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and lauded the company's recent return of jobs from overseas locations. As of that time, it was reported that the company had returned about 100 jobs from overseas during the preceding two year period. The dialSpeed lock is battery operated, has a lit face, and features multiple user programmable combinations. It has a master unlocking code that can be accessed through the company web site. In August 2023, Master Lock announced its Milwaukee plant would be closed by March 2024, laying off approximately 325 employees.

Master Locks are made for a variety of uses, including personal locking, vehicle locking, and others. New products in the 2000s moved beyond locks, such as industrial space cover sealing mechanisms. Almost all of the company's locks are known to have serious security flaws, which allow for easy bypass through lock picking or bump keys or other forms of bypassing. This is because the locks mostly contain standard cylindrical pins, with no, or poorly made, serrated or spool driver pins.