Portfolio Spotlight 🔦 Yellowbox
Yellowbox: a team, a dream, and locker system that’s taking over offices around the world
Hot off the heels of the Peter Farrell Cup, which kicked off for 2023 at UNSW Founders just last week, we thought we’d look back and catch up with past participants, Yellowbox! Read on to see how far they’ve come since being a team with a dream, and how they’ve changed the way lockers can be used around the world. We chatted with Ho Jun Tang, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Yellowbox.
Yellowbox says it best themselves – they are ‘Your smart locker system, made simple’.
The startup provides industry disrupting smart locker technology for workplaces, creating seamless locker access and management with just the touch of a button on an app, or a swipe card.
Starting out as a team of students participating in the Peter Farrell Cup at UNSW Founders, the group of students have now graduated and grown into a fully-fledged company with a product that spans across tens of thousands of users and 8 countries.
Speaking with Ho Jun Tang, Co-Founder and Head of Product, he told us how these foundational workshops helped them test and reiterate their early-days idea and set them on the path for turning Yellowbox into what we know and love it to be today.
“It was a really light touch way for us to test out an idea and get a sense and learn about the startup world, from the lens of creating something from nothing and just testing an idea. And so we came together with the idea of Yellowbox, which was the public smart locker network. And we went through all the sessions that the Peter Farrell Cup has, which allowed us to learn a lot about prototyping and testing the market talking to customers, market sizing, all the really high-level things that you need to know to flesh out an idea.”
From there, their confidence grew – and so did their product offering, as they joined our 10x Accelerator Program in 2019.
“That's really what accelerated our progress and really solidified us as a business, creating a business entity, and then going out and finding customers. And so we were able to get our first few customers during the 10x program. And yeah, that sort of got us into the mould of a business where we were trying to just provide our products to customers, getting feedback from customers, and then start that process from there.”
Yellowbox continued to adapt, meet demand, and most of all, solve problems for people – especially when the hybrid working model boomed during the pandemic.
“The hybrid working market has grown exponentially since COVID, because not everyone's in the office, five days a week,” Ho Jun explained, “Desks have been shifted into co-working for the hot desks. And that means every organisation needs to provide lockers because they've taken away people's desks and their drawers.”
“Only smart locker systems are able to provide that solution for workplace clients,” Ho Jun continued, “And it's worked out [to be a] pretty strong fit for the problems that our workplace clients are facing.”
Today, Yellowbox is trusted by tier one corporate clients to provide a leading technology-first approach to their workplace locker system. Their clients include UNSW Sydney, NSW Government, Telstra, YouFoodz, and Intercontinental Hotel and Resorts – just to name a few!
So, what’s next for the smart locker startup?
“Capitalising on the market and, continuing to grow in all the markets that we've entered into. So over the past year, we've entered into the US, the UK, New Zealand, into Singapore recently.”
For Yellowbox, the investment of hard work has paid off on home soil.
“Australia has had a lot of growth in the past year or two. And that's really because of the investment that we made two years ago. And so, we're really confident now.”
Keep an eye out for Yellowbox’s lockers, and to find out more about their exciting product, visit them at https://yellowbox.app/