The brief

In May of 2018, the amazing team at Carved Custom Wood Cases engaged me to take their Liam Hoffman iPhone 7 plus case and Mount Everest 6000mAh power bank out into the wilderness and put them through their paces.

You can buy the featured products at the below links:

See the full range at https://www.carved.com/

From their website

From the beginning, Carved has been about doing something new. In early 2011, John Webber wanted to make a wood case for his iPhone 4S. His background was in e-commerce, not manufacturing. Grant Sassaman was better at making things. He became the first employee and the two of them started work together to figure out how to craft such a case.

John bought a CNC machine. They put an ad on Craigslist to find someone to teach them how to use it. For six months, they used trial and error to craft something they could sell. It took six months and a lot of work, but the first product was launched Dec. 9, 2011.

The first product was a skin made from wood veneer that you could stick on the back of a phone. We started selling front and back skins for the iPhone 4, iPad 2 and Kindle Fire.

Customers learned that adding a bumper that was popular at the time to deal with Apple’s antenna issues helped protect the iPhone a bit more and created a two-part case. So Carved started selling polycarbonate bumpers to help its customers.

A friend of John’s suggested putting the two together and in mid-2012, the first true cases with wood became available.

We quickly realized that the iPhone 4 skins were what people really wanted so we focused our efforts on perfecting our product and designing new engravings and inlays.

Throughout 2012 we expanded our lineup to include the new iPhone 5. In 2013 we added the Samsung Galaxy S3 and S4, iPad Mini and iPod Touch.