What do you get when you cross an inordinate love of wood and the expertise to shape them into anything under the sun? In the case of this Japanese company, cases and covers for everything under the sun, apparently.

Smartphone cases

LIFE’s primary attractor are their smartphone and tablet cases, which takes up a large part of their company blog. The surge of new smartphones introduced in Japan in the last two half-years are keeping their product design engineers in full churn-out mode, produding prototype after prototype around cell phone mockups (which are becoming easier than ever to find, thankfully) until they have the perfect button placement, size, and thickness; a new Sharp smartphone that went on sale last month was giving them problems, for example, because its back is very round and it’s so damn wide; make it too thick and it’s heavy, but make it too thin and it cracks in half. Their design process for the Sony Ericsson Xperia arc case started off with a rather standard shape that just replicated the arc of the phone, to its own elegant and curvy design that complements the unique shape of the phone perfectly. Their iPod cases feature the same high quality finish, as do their wood cover for Apple’s Wireless Keyboard.

Wood Apple Wireless Keyboard cover

LIFE uses African mahogany for its products; not only is it easy on the fingerpads, the company sells the fact that each case has a unique color and grain to it, resulting in a one-in-the-world cover for your 200-million-in-the-world smartphone that will draw you the envy of fellow train riders, office workers, classmates, and lunch-time café patrons. Each case is handcrafted rather than machine carved, resulting in a more organic look to each case that a titanium hand, for all its perfect replicative ability, cannot reproduce.

The company uses surplus mahogany wood blocks, not new, pristine, just-delivered-from-the-forest wood, keeping their environmental impact and production costs down (their per-product costs do not include materials – just the product development and handcrafting labor costs – which in turn keeps their prices down). They understand the intricacies of wood-carving and are confident in their quality and ability to please, which shows in their lifetime repair warranty for cracks in their cases. And in a display of their playful nature, they’ve made cases for Bic lighters, Frisk mints, and Mintia mints, as well as business card cases that look, from the back, like smartphone covers – albeit a little shorter in stature than their real breathren.

The world stage values Japanese products for a variety of reasons – we are the originators of anime, we churn out odd stuff other people don’t (and/or won’t) think about, we are at the forefront of consumer electronics… and our tacit knowledge (such as of our craftsmen) is unparalleled. The material of these wood cases might not be Japanese, but the hands that conceptualized, designed, and shaped them into what they are are what make us proud.

case, cover, craftsman, high-quality, japanese, smartphone, wood Culture, Japan