CATHERINES CASES |
our story
A note from Shaunak, Jessica, Dimitri & Catherine
Hello there ! Thanks for stopping by to hear our story.
We are a bunch of mavericks (friends, really) figuring out how to make the world a better place for the unconnected through the fusion of design, technology and apps.
You are probably wondering what a smartphone & a case have got to do with this vision. We are firm believers in the mantra that technology brings about a metamorphosis in people’s lives, for better, especially amongst the marginalized sections of society or as the tech press puts it 'the unconnected'
With smart phones, the metamorphosis has been greatly amplified. For the first time (quite literally) in human history, everyone has a chance at equal accessibility. Moore’s law has fundamentally tipped us in the direction of “always-on” technology progress. I remember buying a not too lame, Nokia E90 for $950 a decade ago. Today I can buy an even better device that does more for less than $200. Yet, despite this progress, there are over 3.7 billion people who have no idea what a smartphone is. We want to change that. We want to give smartphones to these people. For free.
As we started building out this vision, we realized we had to subsidize the cost of handsets. We studied the TOMS model (you buy a phone, and we will give a phone) and sought to replicate that. Our initial model centered on a high end Android smartphone called the M1 and the phone we would give out, called the M1+. We ended up manufacturing a test run of 100 devices (drop us a line on Twitter if you want one :) and were very pleased with how the test run turned out. However, somewhere in between we realized there were significant challenges in scaling from 100 to 10,000. Subsidizing was one factor but not a critical one. Two major hurdles were primarily related to costs for 1) establishing support operations for M1 - the phone consumers would buy and 2) enabling network support for the phones we would give out.
Then, in early December a friend of ours, who also happens to be an OEM for Huawei, suggested looking at cases. It was an intriguing suggestion and our first thought was to dismiss it, purely on the basis of costs - after all how could you subsidize a smartphone through a phone case. Upon digging in a little deeper, we figured it was achievable and scalable. More importantly the supply chain was simplified for us to focus on our bringing our vision to life. However, there was still one hurdle, and that was in ensuring quality standards and not fucking things up from a pricing perspective. By bringing down phone specs we were sacrificing performance but we absolutely wanted to be sure that whatever we gave away, did actually have potential to make a positive impact.
This is where we got an unbelievable amount of support from our OEM in subsidizing the hardware cost by $5 per handset (in the cutthroat world of smartphone manufacturing $5 can mean going from profit to loss in a split second) and a yet to be named network operator with whom we signed an NDA last week for exploring inbuilt support for EGPRS/3G services, throttled at 25MB/50MB per month, per device in our target countries. Similar to how 3G services worked on our black and white Kindle’s. This too is important, because it ensures that over time - as we keep giving smartphones away, they will not sit and rot like a brick. Data services will be enabled from the get go and the people who today, at this very moment, are not aware of the internet will be impacted in a positive way.
We want this to be sustainable i.e self sustaining. We don’t have any plans for huge marketing spends on TV. No meaningful advertising. No tracking of your visits to this page. Nada. Simply because we don't have the adequate financial resources (atleast not yet) to do this. This is where you come in. We absolutely need you to spread the word around, become a local stockist, have a case party and more.
What we are trying to achieve at Catherine's Cases is something far more radical than a simple phone case and you are a part of that.
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