Case-Mate’s ‘Recession Case’: Is Cardboard The New Cool?
Tired of wrapping your iPhone in titanium? Looking for something a bit more ‘real’ when it comes to cases? Well, you can’t get more ordinary than some cardboard and a Sharpie-looking typeface. That’s the concept behind Case-Mate’s “recession case.”
“The recession case lets you keep cash in your pocket without sacrificing on unique design for your beloved iPhone,” the company announced. The case costs $0.99 individually or a “bailout bundle”of 10 cardboard cases for $7.99.
The cases also can be personalized using a “Sharpie” font.
While Case-Mate offers free shipping, the design looks very similar to CD mailers. To overcome the confusion, Case-Mate also offers a humorous FAQ, answering questions such as can the cases be used to microwave pizza? (The answer: sure, but the company won’t guarantee the pie’s quality.)
While interesting, the “recession case” is not the first time people have sold ordinary-looking wrappers for their Apple gear. We’ve written about a MacBook case that could be mistaken (except the deliberate typos) for a discarded newspaper. An old FedEx envelope is another option for Gadget Lab’s Charlie Sorrel.
Just recently, we wrote about another unique use for cardboard – this one costing nada. A French industrial designer created a do-it-yourself iPhone dock out of card stock and released a template.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
