Lockersfirst podcast with Brian Dewey from Koloni, hosted by Andre Veskimeister

Hello everybody. My name is Andre Viskemeister and I am the CEO and founder of Parcel Lockers Central. And you are listening the podcast Lockers first. And today's guest is Brian Dewey from the company Colony. Hi, how are you doing today?

Good, Andre, how are you?

I'm doing great, just fine, thank you.

Just your company and your company name. This is interesting, interesting story. I just heard about that. So from what this Colony comes from.

Yeah, so the company named Colony, it spelled the Norwegian spelling. But the idea for Colony and the branding initially was connecting different IoT devices to better connect our communities. So allowing people to access doorways, access control, lockers, micromobility, which is where we initially got started. So connecting everything under a single platform and allowing users to access all of these even from single interfaces. So that's initially how we got started, all the way back in 2016 now. And yeah, we've kept the name ever since.

But now you are sort of concentrating on the partial lockers and partial lockers software mainly. So what is the story behind that? How did you ended up there and what is the scope of the software you are building right now?

Yeah, good question. So we initially started building micromobility software for bike share systems, E bike and scooters. But then we also got into developing fleet software for micromobility for cargo bikes and things like that for fleets. And then we started getting customers asking us to connect our software to lockers. So we actually built an entire platform dedicated to lockers. And we realized that lockers were really being underutilized and we felt that the market was not growing and not being used in as many different applications as we thought they could be. So the thesis around Colony when it comes to lockers is first and foremost enabling the programmability of lockers. So enabling different modes from storage, parcel, you know, food rental and asset management, service, pickup, like laundry services, all underneath the same application and even all can be done at the same locker location if desired. We feel that enabling those different modes, even at a single location, can increase the utilization rate, the use cases and the traffic at that location and just get people more accustomed to lockers. Right now here in the US we don't see even too many lockers at the moment. Besides, maybe if you live in an apartment complex and accessing your package, Europe is a little farther ahead. But we believe that we have a long ways to go.

And really that's what our focus is. The platform enables companies and empowers them to manage their entire locker networks and set these and where we really Initially got going early on was any locker transaction that had payment processing attached to it. So renting a locker, accessing a locker with a package and paying a fee, all of those things is where we initially got started.

Yeah, great. This is exactly the interesting part for me from your product is that you have built so many services on top of the lockers that we don't see very often here in Europe because here they are used mainly for last mile and first mile deliveries. So you have very extensive lineup of over the top services. And this is, this was very intriguing for me to see for what purposes customers are actually using locker. So can you name some of the services on top of that you already named?

Yeah. So people are doing luggage locker services. So there's a lot of luggage rooms throughout the popular destinations in Europe. We can automate that process with installing luggage lockers so you don't have to have somebody in a physical space space. It also provides more security for the user. Parcel pickup and drop off is certainly one of them, whether it's private or in public settings. And also renting of items maybe at a public space, of renting a soccer ball or a tennis racket at a public space or asset management at a corporation. So the one thing that's really allowed us to do that is we're a software company. We don't, we don't develop the hardware ourselves. We're agnostic. We integrate in with a lot of other hardware companies and partner with them. But that really allows us to hyper focus on developing a platform that is as robust as you mentioned.

Yeah, this is extremely important.

From my opinion also to be very independent and whole software as such. But about the integrations with the partners and carriers, this is done by you. So if there are new carriers who would like to join the network, then you will make the integration available for the clients.

Exactly. So there's two ways that we can integrate. One, we've built everything off of APIs so carriers and different companies can and have integrated with us. And then we can also integrate with them as well. So there's actually a Swedish company called Trax that's part of the FP Mailing Solutions group out of Germany. They've integrated with us for an example, to reserve lockers ahead of time that are coming through their software. So they can integrate with us, we can integrate with them. And from a hardware perspective we inevitably do the integration with that hardware to communicate to the lops and, and actually integrate with the physical hardware. But our APIs do offer a wide scale of integration Certainly.

This is interesting.

Proposal for the market, at least here in Europe because here the history has been that the local manufacturers have been providing their own software and mainly carriers have been using their manufacturer's software. But it ends up usually with sort of vendor lock situation that you cannot change the hardware.

When you are using proprietary software. So I see that this is a possibility for companies like you to provide independent and standalone software for operating the networks. And then you. It gives the possibility to choose very different hardware because the needs might be changing during the time. So I think this is very, very good competitive edge for you.

Yeah, it is.

We saw the same thing when we got into the smart locker space.

Even over the last few years have seen it evolve. But when we initially got in, we saw it actually in the same space that we saw micromobility. When we got into the micromobility space. The same principles actually where it's very capex heavy using older technologies, hardware and software, focusing on kiosk interfaces and things that end up creating a lot of friction and reducing the scalability of lockers like it did micromobility. So we're taking the approach of like we, we want to be the industry standard when it comes to software.

Carriers and companies that are wanting to interact with the lockers are quickly noticing that and see the value that again like you said, allowing them to not be locked into one locker manufacturer and locker manufacturers are also starting to realize this as well. We initially got some pushback from locker manufacturers because they do have developed their own software. But as we see, really the only good, great company in the world that I know of that does software really good and hardware really good is Apple. Tesla is starting to figure it out. But beyond that there's not too many companies that do software and hardware exceptional. What we want to do is enable those locker companies to do hardware exceptionally well and do what they're really good at in the programmability of the lockers. Allow them the flexibility of if there is a.

Decrease in the market when it comes to parcel and delivery and that becomes kind of stale. Everything runs in cycles. They still know how to bend metal, they still know how to build lockers. And our software would enable them to provide storage lockers and asset management lockers and these different things to make their business continue to thrive and grow. So that's really kind of the value that we provide. Right in the middle, you kind of nailed it and it's what we've been focusing on.

Great, great. It's good to hear that. Now let's go and talk a little bit about the data and data management and capacity. The one thing that is very fixed in partial local networks is the capacity. You have a fixed number of compartments and you don't have them more in a sense that if you have one parcel more then you cannot provide it or store it because you don't have capacity. And when you have different kind of service providers, then you actually even don't know when the capacity will be on the limits. So do you have some kind of tools or capacity planning or some kind of algorithms that can help you on that way? Or asking more simply how do you handle over capacity?

Yeah, it's a good question. So we do and it's continuing to get stronger and stronger where the algorithms in the database as more transactions are occurring where we can actually the goal is to, is in the future providing more predictive growth metrics. But what we're doing right now is developing algorithms inside of our platform that identifies when, you know, taking that, you know, the peak times the number of people that are interacting with the lockers. And over time we can start identifying what, what locker locations need to be added to much quicker than any of these other companies. We're also doing a little bit of artificial intelligence regarding this too. Andre. Our team is quite exceptional. We're actually, I don't know when this podcast is going to be released, but we're actually releasing a product next week. Very limited for people to use, but initially. But it's a planning product for allowing people using AI, allowing public locker companies to develop plans using data.

Data of movement, data of location and everything to identify hotspots of where lockers should actually be placed using specifically AI, large data, large, large language models. So we take that stuff very seriously and we believe that that's really what is one of the things that's stunting the growth of locker scalability in the market today. So hopefully I can answer your question.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I agree that this is going to be very important part of the future because anyway, in a sense to make money you have to have very fast turnover of the products in the compartments. And this is software. This is nothing to do with the hardware, this is software. Software can initiate more transactions and.

Faster retention from the customers. So this is very important part. I really appreciate that. And when you ask about when does this podcast will be released, I hope to do that over the weekend because next week we are going to meet in Amsterdam, in Boston Parcel Expo and this is going to be very exciting week for both of us.

Yeah, it's the first time I've been to the Parcel and Post show. So we don't have a booth this year. It was kind of a last minute. I had a handful of people asking me to attend. So I'm looking forward to it. A lot of people in the industry are going to be there and I'm looking forward to network with all of them.

Great. I don't have both there either. So we are meeting there with you and all the rest of the several thousand professionals. So thank you, Brian, for the meeting and discussion and hopefully see you next week.

Yes, I appreciate it.