Liam Saranich | News editor
For the past eight years, schools across 41 states have been spending millions of dollars on pouches from a company called Yondr. These pouches are used to lock up phones and other handheld tech devices to limit their use during class.
The brand, Yondr was founded in 2014, with the original idea for music festivals. The founder Graham Dugoni said that he thought of the idea because of the growing issues with phones recording concerts when people weren’t supposed to.
The brand Yondr has been used other social environments like concerts, or comedy shows, but the new big growing demand for the business is school districts all over the country and all over the world, asking to buy the pouches.
Yondr has now been serving over 1 million students (about the population of Delaware) every day in 21 different countries. The pouches zip up and lock up the phones with a separate magnetic tool called “the base.” The cost of the pouch ranges from $25 to $30 dollars per student.
“The Yondr unlocking bases will open any pouch, but there are no individual keys,” a Yondr spokesperson claimed that those were older versions that have “been damaged and therefore look as if they would open very easily.”
The brand before covid had a very steady business growth year-over-year until the pandemic hit. After the pandemic, however when school reopened, they saw an explosion of business and an outreach of schools all coming to Yondr asking to buy and implement the pouches in the classrooms.
“Word-of-mouth referrals from principal to principal increased the number of school partners using Yondr to the point where we now create entirely phone-free school districts,” the spokesperson said.
According to Govspend, a database of government contracts and purchases, a significant portion of the collective $2.5 million spend on Yondr occurred after May 2022.
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