How a firefighter accidentally found the secret door to success

Back in 2012, firefighter Jeremy Barker set out to add a family theater space to his home but was looking for a way to include a little kid-friendly pizzazz to the project.

“I thought, what if we could create an awesome hidden door, like a ticket booth-style door … at least if the theater room is a little bit underwhelming, the door entry could be cool,” Barker said.

With no background in cabinetry and on a quest to find hardware that didn’t tear off the wall when he tried mounting heavy doors on traditional hinges, Barker spent “several thousands of dollars trying to build a hinge,” ultimately coming up with his own design for a surface-mounted hinge system.

And that invention would evolve into what is now the Murphy Door company, a Utah-based business that specializes in hidden doors, Murphy beds and a broad range of home goods that has drawn interest from a wide range of customers including celebrities and Hollywood moviemakers. The business is set to generate nearly $60 million in revenue this year and is in the midst of a national expansion driven by the same urge to innovate that, unintentionally, got the effort off the ground over a decade ago.

An unexpected swing

At first, Barker said the path to a viable business looked like it would be focused on just marketing his unique hinges.

“Murphy door was never founded under the pretense of building the hidden door,” Barker said. “We wanted to be a hardware supplier of hinges for hidden doors.”

But customer demand quickly forced a shift.

“More and more people started saying, ‘Hey, I don’t want the hinge. I want the door,’” he said.

Barker said the effort began as a part-time gig alongside his firefighting duties but blossomed from $30,000 in revenues early on into $1 million in just a few years, helped by a low-budget social media marketing effort that found an interested and engaged audience.

“You have a built-in magic show,” Barker said. “Everyone wants to hang ‘til the end of your video to see what’s behind the hidden door.”

Barker said the evolution of Murphy Door’s manufacturing process reflects the bootstrapped nature of the company’s growth. That includes a one-piece-flow model in which every order is bespoke, or customized to each customer’s needs.

“Early on, I didn’t have the money to buy a massive amount of material inventory,” Barker said. “And that required the one-piece-flow type environment. An order came in, an order went out. It was checkbook-driven because I had no money.”

Barker is also strategic about proximity issues, building his products close to the commodities needed and in locations that compress turnaround times and shipping distance. Advanced manufacturing approaches also play a role and Barker noted his employee count has been consistent since 2017 even as volumes have more than quintupled over the same time period.

A tour of the Murphy Door manufacturing campus in Riverton reveals an impressive deployment of robotic and computer-controlled equipment.

Overhead materials handling units can “see” stacks of sheet goods and are constantly picking up, re-stacking and arranging materials for efficient feeding into laser-guided cutting machines. A 4’ x 8’ sheet goes in one end and out the other side comes a neatly arranged array of precision-cut and drilled parts, complete with customer information and a piece identification chart from which each component is put together. Workers keep the flow going, moving the stacked parts to assembly areas, then a finish room where stains and lacquers are applied and finally to a shipping area where each piece is carefully inspected before heading out to the customer.

With the capacity at the Riverton plant and a new facility in Kentucky, Barker said the company is able to produce a custom unit every six minutes.

How to make a door disappear

So what does a Murphy hidden door look like?

Turns out, just about anything you want it to. Bookshelf hidden doors are popular as are cabinets complete with glass display doors and adjustable shelves. Some doors meld seamlessly into painted walls or brickwork. Some appear to be artwork or mirrors. They can be controlled manually, by a remote, motion detector, secret buttons or even moving a certain book on the shelf. Beside full door passage ways, Murphy also builds shelves or portraits with hidden compartments or safes. You can also order a custom Murphy bed that drops down out of a recessed wall space.

Barker said customers put Murphy Door products into use in a wide variety of settings. Sometimes the doors conceal a pantry or bathroom. Some create sneaky passageways into game rooms, home theaters or lounge areas. You can even get an armored version made with bullet-proof materials and a heavy duty locking system to keep an area, like a safe room, ultra-secure.

Murphy Door has an aggressive national expansion plan in play with new plants coming in Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania. Barker said the micro-plants cost only $4 million to $5 million to launch and allow the company to slash logistics costs.

“We literally spend more money on freight than lumber and we are a wood products company,” Barker said.

Barker said his geographic strategy is aiming to cut 50% of freight costs and that those savings “go right back into consumers’ pockets.” He also touted the positive environmental impacts that come with the approach.

“If you talk about being green … now we’re delivering product from your neighbor to our manufacturing plant to you,” Barker said. “You’ve eliminated those wastes and costs.”

Barker said the company is also on the constant hunt for the best materials with which to create its products and has partnered with investor Daymond John of Shark Tank fame to explore using a hemp-based wood alternative product that will be produced in Utah. Barker said the effort is “looking really good.”

A made in America approach

Nearly the entirety of the materials used in Murphy Door products, with the exception of a few minor electronic components, are made domestically. Barker said that’s been a major advantage amid new tariff fees that have pushed up prices on many of the company’s competitors.

Barker was invited to a meeting this spring at President Donald Trump’s Mar a Lago resort to discuss tariff implications with a group of CEOs of U.S.-based companies. While the president was not in attendance, Barker said one attendee told him he was “the most hated guy in the room” because of his pro-tariff stance. But while Barker said the tariffs have been a boost to his company, and even drawn some contract manufacturing work from other U.S. companies, he decided to share the advantage with his customers in the form of price reductions.

“We lowered our price when the first tariffs were announced,” Barker said. “We’re on Team America and we can ride this and this is what you get for buying an American brand.”

A little Hollywood doesn’t hurt

It’s a brand that’s also drawn interest from a wide array of celebrities, Barker said, and Murphy Door products have been featured in a slew of TV and film productions.

Barker noted the company created custom-built secret doors for the John Wick Experience, a featured installation at the Area15 immersive entertainment venue in Las Vegas.

The story-driven adventure blends elements of escape room tension with an immersive environment based on Lionsgate’s popular John Wick franchise. The series follows Wick, a legendary former hitman, who is repeatedly drawn back into a criminal underworld he’s desperately trying to leave behind.

Gene Rogers, senior vice president for Lionsgate global products and experiences, is part of the team that creates fan experience projects for popular Lionsgate brands including John Wick, Hunger Games, Paddington Bear and others.

Rogers said the Murphy Door custom-builds added a great element to the John Wick Experience project that opened to the public in March and has drawn rave reviews.

“The appeal of the secret doors is that they are unobtrusive and have a lot of mysterious energy,” Rogers said. “It amps up the anxiety of the adventure as well as a thrill for fans when they discover a door that doesn’t look like a door at all.”

Rogers said he and his team really enjoyed collaborating with Barker and the Murphy Door engineers as they worked to find just the right solutions for helping bring the John Wick Experience to life.

Beside the celebrity and Hollywood interest, Murphy Door’s stellar success arc has also made it an attractive acquisition target. Barker said he gets offer calls every week but has no interest in selling right now.

With major expansions under way, Barker said the company continues to be a “laboratory for opportunities” and wants his customers to know the coolest stuff is yet to come.

“What we have in the pipeline, what’s coming around the corner, is so much more exciting,” Barker said. “I want everybody to have what they want, where they want, when they want.”