Se-Kure Controls is a US-based manufacturer of retail security and asset-protection products, founded in 1965 and still building everything stateside across three American plants. Their catalog runs from simple mechanical deterrents to electronic alarm systems, protecting merchandise for retailers, and increasingly for institutions like schools, hospitals, and post offices.

Those electronic products depend on printed circuit boards. For years, Se-Kure produced them by hand or through outside contract manufacturers, neither of which fit the company’s low-volume, high-mix production.

That search for a better way led Se-Kure’s engineering team to Neoden USA, and to a Neoden YY1 pick and place machine and IN6 reflow oven that brought board production in house. This is their story.

Built in the USA to withstand anything

In one store, a flash mob went after a Se-Kure Controls lockbox, slamming it against the concrete floor for ten minutes straight, but it never broke. In another, a group of thieves gave up trying to pry the tablets off a display and dragged the entire table out of the store instead. That is the reputation Se-Kure Controls has earned since 1965: security hardware engineered to outlast whatever the real world throws at it.

The company traces back to founder Roger Layden, who saw that retailers had no good way to watch their own aisles. He found a mirror supplier, loaded up his car, and drove store to store across the Midwest. He would walk into a pharmacy, hold up a mirror, and say, “Now you can see what’s happening in that aisle.” Retailers understood the value right away. Roger did not stop at mirrors. He designed the first one-way viewer, then a control device built to protect merchandise from theft, and in 1965 Se-Kure Controls was born. His motto, “Quality through Design,” still runs the place.

Sixty years later, that philosophy shows up in a detail most competitors have abandoned. Se-Kure builds in the United States, across three US plants (two in the Chicago area and one in Sturgis, Michigan), with metal fabrication, plastic injection molding, and mirrorizing all done in house.

“Everything we build is built right here in the US.”

— Dave Adams, Director of Engineering, Se-Kure Controls

Designed from the sales floor, not the boardroom

Se-Kure’s edge comes from watching how theft actually happens. The team studies real retail environments, how products get displayed, how shoppers handle them, and where the weak points are. When thieves started popping open computer cases to steal the parts inside, Se-Kure answered with a corner-wrapping sensor that detects tampering. That instinct runs through the whole catalog, from the Design-a-Cable system that lets retailers build their own merchandise-protection setups to the wide TV cable that keeps flat screens from tipping.

“You can’t build great anti-theft security from a boardroom.”

— John Mangiameli, Se-Kure Controls

The proof is in what customers actually respond to. When Se-Kure built a cabling system for a big-box retailer whose TVs were getting knocked off the shelves, the pitch that landed was not loss prevention at all. “What sold them on it was not the fact that they’re saving TVs,” Dave says, “but they’re preventing the TVs from falling over on a child.”

Everything is engineered to be obvious to use and nearly impossible to defeat. “Plug it in, set it up, turn it on, walk away,” Dave says of the design goal. The build quality backs it up. Se-Kure runs destructive testing on its products before they ship, and on one lockdown stand a tester broke a three-quarter-inch table before the phone ever came loose. Across more than 1,800 active SKUs, the return rate sits around .001 percent. “So we go and find an actual need,” Dave says, “and then my team goes together and we try and figure out a solution.”

An engineer who wears every hat

Dave Adams, Se-Kure’s Director of Engineering, has been taking things apart since he was twelve, when he started fixing neighbors’ televisions to see how they worked. Nearly forty years later, he leads a lean engineering group of two, a mechanical engineer and an electrical and software engineer, and he stays cross-trained across all of it: electrical, mechanical, and firmware. He came to Se-Kure fifteen years ago as a PCB designer and kept absorbing whatever the company needed, picking up power supply design and mechanical work along the way. He now holds close to ten patents.

That kind of tenure is normal here. The average length of service at Se-Kure runs past twenty years, and the loyalty is cultural: one longtime team member first joined back in 1983, as a part-time high school student. It is the sort of place where solving problems in house is simply how things are done.

Bringing board production in-house

For more than five years, a member of Se-Kure’s team, Maria, had been placing surface-mount components onto boards entirely by hand, then curing them in a toaster oven. It was slow, and the quality was inconsistent. “You’d end up with some quality issues,” Dave says. On a typical prototype run, Maria could finish maybe five boards a day. A single-connector board that Se-Kure produces in batches of tens of thousands could take a month or more to place by hand.

Outsourcing was not the answer either. Se-Kure runs low volume and high mix, with nearly all of its orders falling between 250 and 500 pieces, and it often turns around five different boards in a couple of days. Contract manufacturers wanted minimums closer to a thousand pieces, and as Se-Kure shopped around, costs and lead times kept climbing. The math never worked for the way Se-Kure actually builds.

“She came to me one day and said this is crazy, we have to fix it.”

— Dave Adams, Director of Engineering, Se-Kure Controls

Finding a fit at Arrow Fest

Dave found Neoden at Arrow Fest, a local trade show, in 2024. Neoden was not exhibiting, but another attendee who was running a larger Neoden line pointed Dave toward the company’s new prototyping machine. Dave got on the phone with Jim and Norm at Neoden USA, and the fit was clear. He needed something affordable enough to prove out, simple enough for his existing team to run without engineering standing over it, and backed by support he could actually reach. Just as important, Neoden had a real presence in the United States.

“As long as they keep that presence in the US, we will continue looking at Neoden.”

— Dave Adams, Director of Engineering, Se-Kure Controls

The plan was deliberately low risk: bring in a Neoden YY1 pick and place machine, prove the team could run it, and pair it with a Neoden IN6 reflow oven to finally retire the toaster oven.

Two years, 150,000 boards

Two years later, the YY1 has run more than 150,000 boards, holding around 90 percent efficiency. Maria took to it immediately. That single-connector board that once took a month by hand now runs at roughly 10,000 pieces a day, cured in the IN6 instead of the toaster oven, with the quality problems gone.

"I’m not going to say it’s the best machine in the world, but for a prototyping machine, it’s the only one."

— Dave Adams, Director of Engineering, Se-Kure Controls

For a low-board-count, high-changeover shop, the alternatives from the larger equipment makers simply were not built for the way Se-Kure works, and they came at a cost the board volume could not justify. The Neoden lets Se-Kure swap reels and move from one board to the next in minutes.

It also gave Dave his time back. Certain components on Se-Kure’s boards used to require him personally, because he was the only one qualified to hand-place and solder them. “Now that we have the YY1, they can do it on the machine,” he says. The lab now largely runs itself, with the team coming to engineering only for the occasional placement adjustment. Maria has taken such ownership of the machine that she worked out her own fix for winter static, a dab of alcohol across the feeders before a run, entirely on her own.

KEY RESULT

150,000+ boards in two years

On a prototyping machine rated for roughly 3,000 pieces a year, Se-Kure has run more than 150,000 boards through the Neoden YY1 at around 90 percent efficiency, replacing five-plus years of hand placement and toaster-oven curing.

The support that sealed it

In the first two weeks, Dave and his team were on the phone with Neoden’s Norm just about every day, and Norm could not believe what they were putting the machine through. These days they call about once every six months. “We’ve learned how to fix the machine ourself and keep it going,” Dave says.

What has not changed is that the support is there when it counts. For a shop that cannot afford to wait a week for a technician, that access is the whole point. “I need to be able to pick up the phone, talk to a support guy who knows what they’re doing, and Norm does, and help us get it up and running again.” Compared with the larger equipment vendors, who Dave says will not troubleshoot over the phone and send someone out on their own timeline, the difference is stark.

I can call him at 7 o’clock tonight and he’ll pick up.”

— Dave Adams, Director of Engineering, Se-Kure Controls

What’s next

Se-Kure is not standing still. The company is expanding beyond retail into institutions like schools, hospitals, and post offices, places that need the same safety and security Se-Kure has spent sixty years perfecting. Dave has his eye on a larger Neoden N10 for when the board volume justifies it. “As soon as I do get funding, I’m gonna jump on it.” He is also leaning into AI as a design accelerator, using it to turn a plain-language description of a circuit into a working schematic in about a minute. And the company’s ambition is plain: “I think the goal is to double this company in five years.”

Asked what he would tell another shop weighing a prototyping machine, Dave does not hedge.

“Buy it.”

— Dave Adams, Director of Engineering, Se-Kure Controls

Neoden USA is proud to support Se-Kure Controls as the company brings high-quality PCB production into its own facility, and we will continue to share Se-Kure’s story as their board volume grows.