Most people use their keys for opening more than just doors. In a pinch, we use them to pop tags off of our clothes, to open a new box from Amazon, to slice open letters, to cut twine and scratch the foil off of lottery tickets. Keys aren't designed to do any of these things, but as the only jagged, slightly sharp metal object we have on us at all times, it tends to do double duty as a sort of slapdash Swiss Army knife.
Designed by inventor Chris Hawker of Trident Design, the Quickey is a multi-tool that looks like a key, hangs on your keychain, and is designed to open everything but doors. In a single stainless-steel design, the Quickey allows you to do everything from cut coupons, divide pills, pull out staples, open beer bottles, bust open clamshell packaging, and more.
According to the Quickey's creators, the project was born out of a frustration with the bulkiness of traditional multi-tools. "Multi-tools are typically overkill and cumbersome," they say on their Indiegogo page. "None of us at Trident carry one around because they are just too bulky, yet we craved some of the conveniences they offer. For a large number of life's little tasks, the Quickey is perfect and way better than car keys."
Although the design seems simple, it required a lot of revisions to get right. "The biggest design challenge was getting the bottle opener to both be as small as possible, and to still work well," Hawker tells Co.Design. "It really had to be dialed in, as our first attempts did not work well at all. We made numerous prototypes to perfect it, and the final result works great."
There is no shortage of key-sized tools out there to fill up your keychain, of course, but what makes the Quickey brilliant is the way it folds all of this functionality into a single design. Contained in a two-inch piece of metal are a bottle opener, file, flat head screwdriver, serrated sawing edge, and scoring point. That's a lot of functionality in a very svelte package.
Of course, it'd be great if the Quickey could be cut into a real key, but you can't have everything. Preorder a Quickey now for just $9, and the finished key should ship before the end of June.