The Convoy iPhone case build process
From the first sketches in early 2015 to the Indiegogo funded mould tooling later that year, this is how Convoy went from a hybrid concept to a shipping product.
The brief
Convoy started as a question. Could a wood wallet brand make a phone case without losing the materials story? The honest answer was: not with a fully wooden case. Solid timber phone cases existed already, and they all had the same problem. Wood does not like point loads. A drop onto a hard floor concentrates impact at the corner of the case, and solid timber splits before it absorbs. The cases that did exist were either fragile, or so over-engineered that they doubled the weight of the phone.
The hybrid approach (an elastomer body with a wooden insert) had been tried before but never executed cleanly. The wooden insert in most existing products was an aesthetic veneer glued onto the back of an otherwise standard TPU case. We wanted the insert to do something. We wanted it to be solid timber, not veneer, and we wanted it to carry a useful function.
The hidden tray
The function we landed on was a hidden compartment in the wooden base for a spare SIM card and the iPhone SIM pin ejector. The pin ejector was the part that nailed the brief, because anyone who has travelled with an iPhone has lost one. Slotting it into the case meant it travelled with the phone. The spare SIM was a side benefit for anyone swapping carriers internationally. The compartment was a single machined slot, friction fit, no separate door. The wooden base lifted out of the elastomer body to access it.
Tooling
The elastomer body required a single piece injection mould. Soft tooling for a TPU body in 2015 sat around twelve thousand US dollars for a small run. We did not have twelve thousand US dollars. We ran a modest Indiegogo campaign in mid 2015 with a simple product video and a target of fifteen thousand US dollars to cover the tooling and the first production run. The campaign cleared its target inside the first fortnight and closed out at roughly twice the goal. The mould was cut in Shenzhen. The first units shipped in late 2015.
The wooden bases
The wooden bases were CNC machined in Sydney from the same hardwood supply we used for the wallets. Walnut, oak and cherry. Each base was hand polished after machining, finished with the same tung oil and beeswax blend, and matched to a body before packing. Because each base was cut from a slightly different part of the board, no two Convoy cases had the same grain pattern. That was not a marketing line; it was a function of the production method.
The iPhone problem
By the time Convoy had shipped through 2016 and into 2017, the iPhone 6 was already two model generations behind the current device. We re-tooled the body for the iPhone 6 Plus and shipped a small run, but re-tooling for the iPhone 7 and then the iPhone X form factor would have required a fresh capital outlay for each generation. The category had also changed. By 2017 the average customer was replacing their phone every eighteen months, and a sixty dollar case for a phone already on its way out was a hard sell. Convoy was wound down with the rest of the line in 2018. The mould tooling was retired.
What survived
The Convoy product photography is preserved on the Convoy collection page. The walnut variant page is at Convoy iPhone 6 in walnut; the cherry variant is at Convoy iPhone 6 in cherry. The Indiegogo campaign page is no longer indexed but the film and the press coverage from PopSci and Designboom survive in the wider design press archives.