It began at
a memorial.
Not a product idea. Not a market gap. A question that couldn't be shaken — and a conviction that the answer had to exist.
A whole life of stories — and nowhere safe for them to live.
In May 2018, our founder Geoff Evans stood at the memorial of an extraordinary man — a seven-foot-tall master storyteller whose family had always meant to write down his stories. They never did. Standing there, watching a lifetime of memories begin to fade, Geoff asked a question he couldn't shake.
"Where do memories go?"
Not rhetorically. Practically. Where do the photos live when the photographer is gone? Where does the voice go when it goes quiet? What happens to the stories nobody thought to record?
The answers were bleak. They go to a hard drive that fails. To a cloud account that gets cancelled. To a shoebox that gets thrown out. To nothing.
Building the answer.
Geoff didn't start with the hardware — he started with the question of what a memory actually is, and what it means to preserve one properly.
That meant talking to hundreds of families. Digitizing old film and faded prints. Sitting with people while they described what it felt like to lose something — and what it felt like to find it again.
It meant hardware decisions: what material holds up for fifty years, what form factor belongs in a living room, what makes something feel worth passing down rather than throwing out.
And it meant software decisions: how do you build AI that helps without intruding, that organizes without deciding, that makes a family feel like they're discovering something rather than being shown an algorithm's output?
The answer to the hardware question was wood and aluminum. Sustainably sourced hardwood — walnut, cherry, and African sapele — because grain is alive in a way that plastic and metal aren't. Because no two pieces are alike. Because a thing that's beautiful gets kept.
The answer to the software question was privacy-first from the start. Everything on the device, in your home. No cloud processing, no data mining, no third-party access. The AI runs locally, understands locally, stays locally.
And beneath the very first Lockboxes built: an engraving of the people they were made to honor. Not an afterthought. The point.
Geoff still builds and refines each detail by hand. That's the part that doesn't scale, and the part we'll never give up.
"The things you can't bear to lose should never live on someone else's server."
That's the promise every Lockbox is built on. It's not a tagline. It's a constraint — one that shapes every hardware decision, every line of software, and every conversation we have with the families we work with. Today it’s why the Archive Year ends the way it does: a year of building on our workbench, and then the archive comes home — to your shelf, for good.
Built at spARK Labs,
St. Pete.
Memoresse is designed and built in St. Petersburg, Florida, as part of the spARK Labs innovation community at the ARK Innovation Center. It's a good place to build something that's meant to last.
Memoresse LLC at spARK Labs1101 4th Street S
St. Petersburg, FL 33701 Get directions
Start with a conversation.
We onboard a limited number of families each month, so every archive gets the attention it deserves. The first conversation is free — thirty minutes with our founder, Geoff. No spam, ever.