The honest origin of Lochtags is unglamorous: I lost a set of keys.
Not commercial fleet keys, not a wallet with passport money in it — a regular set of house and truck keys that fell out of a jacket pocket somewhere between a hockey rink and a parking lot. Two days of kicking myself and one $400 locksmith call later, I went looking for the modern equivalent of "stick a piece of tape on it with my number written down."
Here's what I found, in 2024:
- AirTags ($30 each, battery, broadcasts your location 24/7)
- Tile ($25 each, paid subscription, battery)
- Vintage paper "if found, return to" labels (no privacy, your address goes on the tag)
- A handful of small NFC services, mostly American, mostly missing the point
None of those were what I wanted. I wanted a tag that:
- A finder could tap with any phone, no app required
- Didn't leak my home address or phone number to whoever found it
- Didn't have a battery to die
- Cost less than the locksmith call
That's it. That's the whole product brief. So we built it.
Who "we" is
I'm Kevin Girdler. I served in the Canadian Armed Forces, where I learned that gear discipline isn't about being neat — it's about being able to find the thing when you need it. After my service I worked in security and operations roles where managing keys, badges, radios, and equipment for teams of people was a daily problem. I've been on the inside of "where the hell are the spare gate keys" more times than I can count.
My co-founder Emad Elshmoury runs the technical side. He's the reason the system actually works at scale — the database, the email pipeline, the privacy model where finders never see owner contact info, all of it.
The two of us are the company. There's no investor deck, no customer success team, no growth hacker. There's a workshop in Leduc, Alberta where the printing happens, a server we manage ourselves, and a phone that I answer when customers call.
What the product actually does
Every Lochtag is a small NFC sticker or keyring with a unique URL. You buy the tag, you tap your phone to it, you fill in a 60-second registration form: who you are, what the item is, how to contact you, and any reward or instructions you want to offer.
When someone finds your stuff, they tap their phone to the tag. The same URL opens. They see "this is K's car keys; if found, please use the form below to send a message" — and a message form. They never see your phone number, your email, or your address. You get the message, you reply if you want, you arrange the return.
That's the whole product. Twelve dollars and twelve seconds to set up. No app, no subscription, no battery.
Why Canada?
Most of what we sell ships across Canada and we're proud of that. Our manufacturing is in Alberta. Our team lives here. Our pricing is in Canadian dollars and our customer support is on Canadian hours.
That last part matters more than it sounds. The international "smart tag" companies operate on US support hours and their refund policies are written for US shipping addresses and US customs rules. When a Canadian customer's tag gets stuck at a border facility, or when a hockey-team manager in Saskatoon needs 40 keychains for a tournament, "talk to a real person" isn't a marketing line — it's an actual phone call to me.
We charge what we charge because we want this to work as a real business that pays a few real wages, not as a venture-funded growth experiment. We don't take subscriptions. We don't sell finder data. We don't run ads against our customer pages. The tag gets sold once, the service runs forever.
What we've learned
A few things that surprised us in the first year:
Most lost items are returned by ordinary people. Roughly 80% of the recoveries we see are kind strangers who tap a tag because they're curious. The system doesn't depend on heroes; it depends on a low-friction, no-judgment way for an ordinary person to do a small good thing.
Privacy matters more than we expected. People aren't worried about their bag — they're worried about their address ending up on a stalker's spreadsheet. The "you're never visible to the finder" piece of the product is what closes the sale, not the recovery rate.
Fleet customers are the unsung use case. Equipment yards, trade companies, and rental businesses don't lose stuff to thieves; they lose stuff to staff turnover and untagged inventory. A $4-each NFC keychain at scale changes how a company manages its keys, radios, and gear.
The tag has to be ugly. Counterintuitive, but true. A good lost-and-found tag is one a thief looks at and decides isn't worth stealing the bag for. We make the tags durable and unobtrusive, not chrome-and-glossy.
Where we're going
We're working on a fleet portal for businesses (already live), a partner program for hockey associations and community groups, and bulk pricing for properties and rentals. The core consumer product — buy a tag, register it, get your stuff back — will stay simple, cheap, and Canadian.
If you've got an idea for what would make this useful for your specific use case — pet collars for kennels, badge-clip tags for trade shows, asset tags for trucking — write to us. The product brief at the top of this post was the first one. We're always taking the next one.
— Kevin Lochtags, Leduc AB
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