Lock & Lock Insider Issue 5 March 15, 2005 The Perfect Lunch Box! Lock & Lock has applied consumer insight to become the expert in lunch bags, which make up a surprisingly large market segment. Students and workers alike look forward to lunch as personal and social time to relax during a busy, structured day. Today’s lunches need to be quick, convenient, and inexpensive. A great value, Lock & Lock lunch sets are durable, efficient, attractive, and very user-friendly. They are easy to clean, keep lunches from getting crushed, and prevent leaks, spills, and odors. Kids love to pack their lunches for school, and the foods they choose fit perfectly into Lock & Lock containers; sandwiches, cookies, crackers, pudding, apple sauce, string cheese, lunchmeats, and pizza are among the favorites. Ideal for kids age 3-6, as a first lunch kit, are the small containers with dividers: HPL806C and HPL815C. Kids age 7-10 will find HPL754S and HPL758S just right, with two food containers and a beverage bottle. Adults and kids age 11 and up will enjoy HPL816S, a larger kit with three food containers and a beverage bottle. Along with these specially-designed lunch kits with an attractive cooler bag included, several individual Lock & Lock containers are great for lunch. The Divider comes to mind immediately. Many styles are available. HPL817C, for example, is a one-liter container with three compartments, one twice as large as the other two. HPL815C holds 550ml, and has two compartments of the same size. If you wish to configure a new container-and-bag-kit to meet your customers’ unique needs, contact Johnny Park: Johnny@ locknlock.com. Otherwise, check out the Lock & Lock catalog to choose the kit that works best. HPL754N HPL816S Customer Testimonials Fresh Christmas Cookies in February: “I love this product! I first discovered Lock & Lock on QVC. I made cookies at Christmas time and needed a container for them. I used one of the Lock & Lock containers. Needless to say, it worked like a charm. Here it is February, nearly two months later. I just ate the last of the cookies and they were fresh!” -- Harriet, New Jersey Inside this issue: Partner Showcase: Lakeland Ltd. 2 Calling All New Mums 2 Target: Chic-Appeal Makes 3 This Mega-Discounter Unique What else can Lock & Lock Trade Show Update 4 Lock & Lock Logo 4 keep fresh? Lock & Lock Insider, Issue 5 Page 2 Partner Showcase: Lakeland Ltd. From Farmers’ Basics to WorldClass Kitchen Goods Originally supplying local farmers in the UK with polyethylene bags for freezing their poultry, Lakeland Ltd., formerly Lakeland Plastics, now operates a thriving, thirty-outlet retail and mail order business. Lakeland, adopt- ing its new name in 1997 due to its widely-expanded product range, was founded nearly 45 years ago by an agricultural feed salesman, Alan Rayner, and his wife Dorothy. They began with haystack covers and silage sheeting, as well as some non-plastic items: refrigerators, gourmet frozen foods, and egg boxes. Since their original business, oriented toward “home freezing,” was seasonal, Lakeland decided to enter the logical next phase: kitchen prod- ucts. They produced a simple catalog, offering hard-to-find, innovative products, and then bought some land and built a Flagship Store. Lakeland attributes becoming the leading supplier of kitchenwares and housewares in the UK to this expansion, and to their exemplary customer service. Today, along with their retail outlets and catalog sales, www.lakelandlimited.com is their successful online shop. Lakeland’s catalog and Internet mail orders are filled in their 80,000 sq. ft. Direct Despatch Centre, which ships six thousand orders a day, all automatically loaded into several forty foot long trailers. This is amazing, considering that the family first shipped orders by wheeling them to the local post office on a trolley. Lakeland Ltd. currently distributes over four thousand items, and Lock & Lock is pleased to be among these world-class, innovative products. Calling All New Mums As you can read on www.locknlock. com, under the news clippings section, popular UK parenting magazine Parents’ Guide recently praised Lock & Lock as an ideal component of a baby kit. Lock & Lock helps to create the safe, clean, and organized environment in which a healthy, happy baby thrives. “Lock & Lock can help mums through every stage of a new baby’s life,” the clipping says, and is perfect for storing “first aid essentials, cotton wool buds, and formula milk.” The containers are ideal even as the baby approaches weaning time: soft foods can be kept fresh for the longest possible time, thanks to a totally airtight closure. The article goes on to suggest places to find and buy Lock & Lock, including Lakeland, John Lewis, Waitrose, Fenwicks, Harrods, House of Fraser, Selfridges, and other independent cook shops. Lock & Lock Kit for New Mums The Rayner Brothers Lakeland Store in Windermere Everyone at Lakeland is determined that their customers receive the best quality and service. Lock & Lock Insider, Issue 5 Page 3 Target: Chic-Appeal Makes This Mega-Discounter Unique With more than a quarter of a million employees and 1,272 stores, Target is the third largest retailer of housewares in the US. In 2003, Target had total sales of US$48B, roughly $5B of which came from housewares. Revenue in 2002 came to $43.9B, exactly the same as Wal-Mart, the world’s largest company, ten years before. Based in Minneapolis, MN, the first Target store was opened in 1962 by an already 40-year-old retailing firm named Dayton’s. Sixty-two days later, Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart in Arkansas. Interestingly, Kmart and Kohl’s launched the same year. In 1970, there were 17 Target stores with over $200M in sales. From the start, Target had a unique approach among discounters: to take the bestquality merchandise of a high-end department store’s “bargain basement,” and sell it in a standalone shop. Target was to be an updated, stylish retailer (Shoppers nicknamed the store “Tarzhay” in the sixties due to its hipness) with prices just above other discounters. Target has maintained and developed this strategy to the present. The king of “cheap-chic” mixes high style with low prices by offering inexpensive versions of high-end products by designers such as Michael Graves, whose coach’s whistle teapot sells for $35, or maternity clothes by Liz Lange. Similarly, Target rescues hot designers in financial dismay; buying exclusive rights to Mossimo designs in 2000, the Company now offers custom-made jeans for less than $40. Another strat- egy is to team-up with major manufacturers. Sony makes a white-color line of iPod–related products exclusively for Target, such as a boombox into which the MP3 player is inserted. Boutique-type items make it onto the shelves as well, such as environmentally-friendly soaps by Method, a once-tiny San Francisco-based company that has gone from two to ten product lines in two years. Though Target is cool, it doesn’t make its bucks from its cool products. It makes them from diapers, DVDs, paper towels, toothpaste, and the like… the same stuff that Wal-Mart sells. Chic products lure in the customers, and then they pick up their bathroom needs and doughnuts on the way to the register. Though unique, Target does want to copy Wal-Mart in one big way: its huge growth. The Company believes that it can, if it continues its current trajectory, and further develops its one-of-a-kind personality. In 2004, Target sold more than 350,000 Lock & Lock containers. As a highly-innovative product of excellent value, Lock & Lock is undoubtedly an asset to this unique retailer. Currently, Target stocks two sets, and four individual items: a six-piece round set (HPL933DST), a six-piece square set (HPL822BST), a 5.1 Cup square piece (HPL822D), a 10.9 Cup square piece (HPL822B), a 7.2 Cup tall, round piece (HPL933D), and an 8.4 Cup rectangular piece (HPL819T). Target and Lock & Lock are two companies to watch, as they continue to revolutionize their market segments and explode into success. Target’s Lovable Mascot Lock & Lock 11 Container Set Available at Target.com In 2004, Target sold more than 350,000 Lock & Lock containers. Target’s typical guests are young, well-educated, moderate-to-better income families with active lifestyles. The average age of guests is 45, the youngest of all major discount retailers. The median household income is roughly $57,000. Page 4 Lock & Lock Insider, Issue 5 Trade Show Update In mid-February, Lock & Lock’s 30’ x 15’ booth at the Ambiente Frankfurt Show, the world’s largest consumer goods trade fair, was a great success, drawing lots of valuable attention from our European business partners. Now, we are thrilled to be participating in the 2005 International Home and Housewares Show at McCormick Place, in Chicago, from Sunday, March 20th through Tuesday, March 22nd. Check out all of the exciting information at www.housewares.org/ihshow. Lock & Lock Booth at the Frankfurt Show Our representatives, including executives from both the American and the Korean offices, will promote our newest products, along with our extensive Premium polycarbonate and Classic polypropylene lines. Attendees will surely find our 30’ x 10’ Lock & Lock expo (South Building, booth # 1446-1448) both fascinating and informative. Booth Design for the Chicago Show Lock & Lock Logo In early 1998, when one of the world’s premier products was born, a new logo, destined to contribute to a world-famous brand, also came into being. Lock & Lock: the motion involves locking two sides at once (“Lock”), and then the other two sides at once (“and Lock”). It’s a simple way to create the perfect airtight seal, illustrated by two interlinking padlocks. We are very proud of our logo, and thus use it on our corporate signage, embossed on our products, on product labels, in our newsletter, on our website, and on all other marketing materials. We request that each of our partners please be sure that you are using the exact logo that you see here, keeping in mind color as well as content. We would be happy to answer any logo questions, and assist you in acquiring the tools you need. Please contact Johnny Park: Johnny@locknlock.com. Hanacobi, Co., Ltd. 1556-1 Seocho 3-Dong Seocho-Gu, Seoul, Korea Lock & Lock, Inc. 199 Technology Dr., Suite 130 Irvine, CA 92618, U.S.A. Phone: +82-2-520-9632 Fax: +82-2-522-7737 E-mail: johnny@locknlock.com Phone: +1-949-753-8600 Fax: +1-949-753-8601 E-mail: locknlock@highel.com Copyright © 2004-2005, Lock & Lock, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Lock & Lock, Inc.