Friday, February 12, 2021 7 Brooklin Town Crier Local Business Update: When Havlar Was On The Verge The pandemic has obviously damaged the business world and, in some cases of small businesses, perhaps irreparably. However, it's also put on hold ideas that might have turned into something. Consider Havlar, the brainchild of Brooklin's Daryl Gibson, his brother Kyle and father Tom. As reported in the BTC in October of 2019, the Havlar personal safe was within months of crowdfunding and then production before Covid put a halt to it all. The Havlar safe was designed to be a small, near break-proof, device to store important items like cell phones, wallets, and keys while traveling, biking or going to the gym. The investment in time and money along with mounds of paperwork for patents and such had brought the Gibsons to the point where they were telling potential customers of a March, 2020, target date for the first manufacturing run. Then came Covid. As Daryl Gibson now says, they would have had to have met a purchase order from the supplier of 5,000 units, this in a world with gyms closed and travel all but halted. "It was terrifying to accept money and not meet orders." A number of other considerations jumped to the fore. Given the world's new circumstances, would people even want to buy the safe, let alone have the disposable income to do so? "We determined," he recalls, "that now (last March) was not the right time. We determined we'd put things on hold. There were just too many unknowns to push forward." Fortunately, they had no overhead and, of course, no stockpile of product sitting somewhere needing to be sold. And so Havlar is on hold. "It's a setback," Gibson admits, "but 2021 should be better." (To read the original feature about Havlar, visit brooklintowncrier.com, Past Issues, 2019, and the issue of Oct. 25)