Story
Keyper was the first product Ezra and I shipped through Halbert and Gershanok Group. We built it to help students stop losing dorm keys. Since 2018 it has made it into more than 2,000 bookstores across the United States, and the catalog now includes 20+ tech accessories and dorm essentials built around the original phone wallet.
Ezra and I met as kids at summer camp and stayed close for years. In July 2018, Ezra kept seeing the same problem among his freshman-year friends at Penn State: people losing dorm keys. He had already lived his own version: he had stepped out for a shower, his roommate locked the door by mistake, and he walked to the commons desk in a towel to pick up a temporary key. That was when it stopped feeling like someone else's hassle and turned into something worth building.
Ezra's girlfriend posted a Snapchat story of Ezra pacing his room while he talked to a potential manufacturer about the product, captioned “Ezra's Shark Tank idea.” I saw it, called Ezra, and we started designing together. We found a manufacturer in China, iterated on what became Keyper, and the wallet students buy today is still the same core design we started from.
At first Ezra and I sold Keypers straight out of our backpacks. Ezra drove our push into local independent bookstores: he would walk in cold, set up custom handmade displays he had built, and lean on lookalike university marks on the pitch (a Penn State-style paw was one example) long before we had official licensing in place.
In June 2020 we won the Inc.U pitch competition thanks to Shark Tank entrepreneur Lou Childs. She became one of our first mentors. She also connected us to a warehouse partner in Columbus, Georgia, who we still work with to this day.
In late 2020, we brought in a distributor and secured official licensing for U.S. college marks. In 2021 a Barnes & Noble trial turned into placement as a core product in Barnes & Noble college bookstores. By 2022 the line had grown to twenty plus add-ons, mostly popular tech accessories and dorm essentials alongside the original phone wallet.
