20th century Before co-founding the company in 1921, Harry Soref had been a traveling locksmith in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, He tried unsuccessfully to get some large companies interested in using his design, so he and two friends—P. E. Yolles and Sam Stahl,—worked together to found the Master Lock company in
Milwaukee in 1921 to produce the locks themselves, initially with five employees. However, the brand had not yet reached its peak status as a familiar consumer brand at the time of Soref's death. Later, Master would incorporate the image into a one-second-long
blipvert commercial in 1998. At its peak in the early 1990s, the company employed about 1,300 workers in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. In 1993, the company began moving much of its manufacturing to China. Most of the jobs at its Milwaukee plant—over 1,000—were eliminated, although the company continued to perform some of its manufacturing at the plant using heavily
automated manufacturing processes. Master Lock requested that the designer locks be stocked in departments outside the hardware section of retailers. In 2003, the company acquired Illinois based American Lock and all their intellectual and material property. In 2010, Master Lock began offering a
password manager service called Master Lock Vault that includes a web site and associated software applications for use on various devices. In 2011, Fortune Brands spun off Master Lock as part of Fortune Brands Home & Security. In January 2011, it was announced that about 36 jobs were being
returned from China to the Milwaukee plant, which would increase the number of positions at the plant to 379. In February 2012, U.S. President
Barack Obama visited the Master Lock headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and lauded the company's recent return of jobs from overseas locations. As of that time, it was reported that the company had returned about 100 jobs from overseas during the preceding two-year period. The dialSpeed lock is battery-operated, has a lit face, and features multiple user-programmable combinations. It has a master unlocking code that can be accessed through the company web site. In May 2023, Master Lock announced its Milwaukee plant would be closing. They completed the closure in March 2024. == Locks ==