Totallee Founder on Minimalist Phone Cases and Customer Relationship as Startup Backbone
Mobile phone case have continued to attract a lot of innovation from the startup and tech communities. While there are hundreds of companies offering mobile phone cases, and so many of these are in the market already, there seems to be a never ending need to push the limits further. Totallee is a new company innovating in this space. Their phone cases are super thin, and ultra light. We caught up with Matthias, the company’s founder, and discussed briefly how his company intends to create change in this space.
ABOUT TOTALLEE
“We make super thin and almost invisible phone cases,” Matthias remarks. While that is as simple and short an elevator pitch you will ever hear, Matt continues to delve into the company’s history.
Launched in 2013 in South Pasadena, California, the company has always had the goal for transforming the space with less chunky cases. The iPhone case was their starting point. Over time, with a team of 7 people, they have began to make cases for the Pixel and Galaxy phones.
WHY PHONE CASES
Matthias’ goal was to create and grow a portfolio of e-commerce consumer product brands that put great care into the products they sell and the people they sell them to. He realized that the Internet allows for new companies to create higher quality products at lower prices and offer better service by selling directly to customers.
For the first brand, totallee, he was looking for a way to elevate a boring but popular consumer product. When totallee started in 2013 most iPhone cases were very bulky, cheaply made or poorly designed.
Most companies catered to people looking for extreme protection or cases with fun designs. Matthias identified a market gap for more refined and stylistically discrete cases. So totallee was built around the idea of creating a product for people looking for an understated, no-nonsense, quality phone case. A simple and well-made product. Nothing more and nothing less.
Specifically, the Totallee phone cases have the following advantages as compared to the others in the market:
- adding grip to your phone to make it less slippery.
- adding extra scratch and bump protection without adding bulk.
- adding a touch of understated color to personalize your device
PHILOSOPHY
Matthias loves minimalism. The idea that less is more is an important driving factor for the company as a principle of desire to express elegance in the products. He has built Totallee on the backbone of customer satisfaction.
“Our company as a whole is a bit different from our more established competitors in that we are a digitally native brand. This allows us to have closer connections to our customers. We can pay closer attention to customer feedback, which helps us improve our products or create new products customers love (last month we launched a super thin and completely transparent case which quickly has become our new best-seller. Customers told us that’s something they want and we listened).”
The young startup is currently at the forefront of industry terms as well, providing a 2 year warranty on every case they sell. The founder is an art and design graduate with a serious focus on fine arts. He hopes that in the years to come, his company will have a commanding voice, as it continues to grow in the digital space, in order to define how consumer products are designed, even while making them easily affordable for every customer who needs them.
