Every now and then you hear something that makes your heart bounce with pride, and recently we at Cult of Mac heard one of those things.
It turns out that a prototype iPhone case design we featured here back in March has become a real commercial product, thanks to its investors seeing it mentioned on our site.
We’re delighted that we were able to play our part in turning this business idea into reality. But we’ll let the guy who came up with it, Joey Chun, tell the whole story.
His idea was simple: a case with a built-in kickstand to support an iPhone while using the camera. The kickstand was designed so that you could lock it in position just by clicking little plastic lugs. This also meant you could adjust the angle of view very easily, and have the kickstand facing in either direction away from the phone. The whole kickstand folded up inside the body of the case for convenient storage.
Joey tried Kickstarter to raise a few thousand dollars and start manufacturing, which is where we spotted his design. Sadly the Kickstarter campaign didn’t succeed.
Joey says: “We were pretty disappointed when the campaign didn’t work. But thanks to your coverage, we were picked up by a private investor.
“An Italian company approached us with interest in the case.
“Their main interest was in purchasing our design and creating cases in Italy for the European market. And at the same time, they were open to the idea of selling cases to us, for the US market.
“We thought that this was a great opportunity for us and went with it. Our Italian partners preferred the name iPik, so we switched to that from pic.me.”
“It’s been a great journey so far, since we were finally able to see our product come become a reality.”
The iPik for iPhone 4 costs $21.99 (or $15.99 for iPhone 3GS owners), with an additional $2.50 shipping. If you’re in Europe, you need to buy from ipik.it where the price is €19 plus €2.80 shipping.
