A search for ‘iPhone case’ in Amazon will produce around 6.5 million results including covers that are simple and functional to those that are amazing and extravagant. There are also those that are somewhat bizarre e.g. cases shaped like perfume bottles or those that are made of fake fur or even made of Swarovski crystals.
Then there are cases that can hold prescription pills and those that offer other minor conveniences. Finally, there are cases that are more expensive than the phones themselves such as those that are made exotic material like crocodile hide or ones that feature 24-carat gold trim.
There is one particular material that iPhone case-makers hadn’t tried till now and that is – stone. Maybe it is because of the perception that nobody would want to walk around with a slab of rock in his pocket, making the phone a lot heavier. However, iPhone users have been using covers that are imitations of stone textures mostly made of plastic. That is no longer the case. A San Francisco based iPhone case maker, Mikol, has crossed this frontier and is now selling iPhone cases made from genuine Italian Carrera marble. That’s not all; they’ll even make a phone case from other kinds of rocks, including amethyst, rose quartz and sodalite, although they are more expensive.
Mikey Wu, founder of Mikol, said, “There were a lot of marble prints. Everybody buys prints of marble, (but) I figured, I’d want the real thing instead of plastic.” Over the last couple of years, he noticed a growing number of iPhone cases on the market that imitated stone. Wu is a construction industry entrepreneur and knew how to make the real thing. He had been working on ways to use lasers to cut the marble to its thinnest possible slice and finally managed to get it down to 0.7 millimeters, which was equivalent in thickness to a stick of chewing gum. Presently, Mikol makes around 10,000 such phone cases in a year and sells them for $99 each.