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Wow! What a crazy 5 years it has been since we successfully launched our Bamboo line of Blackbox Cases on Kickstarter! We've been receiving quite a few messages regarding the rumored new MacBooks and MacBook Pros Apple may soon announce ... and YES - we will be making new bamboo cases for these devices once Apple says "Here they are!"

Hearing from our customers about stories and adventures your Blackbox Cases have been on is like music to our ears! For those of you who have reached out and shared with us, we certainly thank you! The photos of what your 5 year old cases look like is pretty remarkable. Our general response is ... "Have you even used your case!?" We've lost a couple feet here and there, but generally your photos look like your cases are still brand new.

We apologize for being quiet over the last couple years, but if you have visited us at blackboxcase.com you will notice that we are shipping cases for every iPad model and MacBook Apple is currently shipping! We look forward to having a voice again and sharing new concepts, ideas and discounts with our original 376 Kickstarter backers :)

If this update reached you... we would love to hear your thoughts on a couple questions we've been pondering.  Are you still using your case?  What did you convert it into if you've quit using it?  How any countries has your Blackbox Case visited!? Are your rubber feet still intact? How many times have you served cheese on your Blackbox Case!?  How about all those TSA security tote trays your case has saved your computer from?

We love hearing from our customers for both positive and negative feedback, so thank you for sharing with us and we look forward to protecting all your future Apple investments in the future :)

Rock on!
Greg Hydle

Blackbox Case lasered up some awesomeness for the High Fives Foundation 2nd Annual Colorado Golf Tournament this past week! Pictured above is a 15" Natural Bamboo Wood Case for and Apple MacBook Pro Retina, a 13" Carbonized Apple MacBook Pro Retina Case in the middle, and a 12" Natty MacBook Bamboo Blackbox Case on the bottom. As a team, we shot 20 under par at the super elevated Copper Creek Golf Course and only finished in 4th place overall ... which didn't result in any awards coming our way, but technically it's ok because we also made the awards!

We nervously launched Blackbox Case the day before Thanksgiving, 2009. From there, it was off to the races: learning how to make a continuously cool product, learning how to tell you about a cool product, learning how to deal with crazed-Christmas-gift-givers, learning how to run a business, learning, learning, learning. It’s been a hell of a lot of work, many thousands of cases, and a lot of fun. 

Blackbox Case was founded on the idea of hand-making a no-compromise product in America and being damn proud of it. It has worked and it has been hard. There have been struggles with profitability: America is an expensive place to make things. Sometimes making a thousand cases will make you pull your hair out and start swearing. In the end I hope that Blackbox Cases have retained their original soul, their prideful design, and I think they have. Through the struggles, I’ve definitely taken a blow to my idealism of taking the world by storm with a, well, solid ideal. Sometimes it feels like the river is going the wrong way. It’s freeing to tell you that chasing that ideal has me feeling beat down.

However.

You all are in more than 65 countries enjoying Blackbox Cases. We had never made a product before. We learned how to. We were scared shitless launching a new, unheard of product. We got over that. We got a lot of love-letters from you all. We introduced a product so unique it inspired hundreds of articles within a week and many copycats thereafter. We made a ton of mistakes and learned more than possible in a classroom. We risked, went (for) broke, and did it. We brought a product whose design we were incredibly proud of and we didn’t budge.

So what’s happening? Blackbox Case is taking a hiatus. I (Lance) will be moving with my wife to Cairo, Egypt, as she is going to become the world’s greatest first  grade teacher at an international school. As such, I have chosen to park Blackbox Case for now. I’m excited for a lifetime of projects and inventions and it is time to proceed.

We will be fulfilling orders, catching up on orders, and selling/making a very limited quantity of cases for the next few months. If you’re waiting on an order that hasn’t made it to you yet, I am sorry. Those should all be shipping in the next week or two.

Here’s what I want you to hear and I really want future Me to remember: Stick to it. If you are proud of what your life produces that’s worth being stressed over. Failure is scary, so get over it. Take your ego out of and put your heart in. If you’re in it for the money you’re missing it. You need to try “it.” People will think you are wrong but usually they are wrong. You will not get it the first time so get back up. Have fun. Risk.

“But screw your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail.” -Shakespeare

There’s a lot - a LOT - of articles on how to “brand” your business and yourself. Apparently you’ve gotta do it, or you and your business and your life and your wellbeing are just plain sunk. You need to put out the right vibe to make the people come running...

What if the products - the output - of your life were so you that you don’t have to re-brand who you is? What if the inventions, the ideas, the messages, the friendships that come out of your head were so unedited and so you that they did the branding of you for you?

Man, that would be fun. I could be, like, one person. And I could be who I want to be. It’d be like writing an inspired blog post without having go back and edit it.

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Gosh, creating stuff is scary. It might not work. People might tell you what they don’t like about it. In fact, they might even judge you. You might fail, go broke, and end up in the ghetto gutter. What is your spouse, friends, and dog gonna think about you then?

And damnit, they don’t even give you a manual of how to do it. They make everything go wrong and make it difficult and expensive. Creating doesn’t come with an insurance+retirement plan and it sure doesn’t come with a security clause.

It’s almost like you’ve gotta pull it out of thin air. It’s like you’ve gotta get on google, drive to Home Depot, risk cutting your hand off, and risk being wrong. You need to believe in yourself and you really can’t ever stop. The fear of creating will sit on your shoulder and it won’t leave 'till you teach it you don’t care. 

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Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

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Stunned! The greatest game of all time is back:

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Jennifer Garner struts her stuff past the genius physicist who is watching the new Terminator movie while wishing his fortune was as large as Bill Gates' on the news. The teenage girl adores Kim Kardashian, all the while Kim wishes she could be a girl again. And watching Avatar for the third time leaves your average life feeling bland and boring.

We're exposed to a lot of larger-than-life stories these days. It's tempting to compare our seemingly insignificant life to the grand story of Harry Potter (among others) and be disappointed with our day-to-day.

Remember to also consider your own life a great story. Your life is one worth being jealous of, and one worth fighting for. Yes, it might look different than a Hollywood production, but it is great, all the same.

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 As a child, my teachers, well, hated me. I didn’t really excel in school. I just put in my time. They told me “you’re better than this,” and “you’re gifted and lazy.” What they didn’t see was that I couldn’t wait to go home and start really learning. Legos, paper airplanes, building my own potato gun, welding, and digging holes all awaited me. The things, and intuition, I learned from that creative space in my life is priceless to me. School was school. Life was learning. Then, some day, it began to change. School is learning and Life is life. It’s as if we reserve a 20 year chunk of life for learning at school, then go out and expect to use that learnedness.

When did creativity become less important than biology? And when did college become the only way to the promise land?

I’m not here to completely rag on school. I think it’s a great thing. But I do think we often use school for our self esteem and a paper certificate more than we use it to learn. I’d prefer to question the system:

• What if you quit your MBA program and started a business that teaches you how to run a business? Would that be cheaper than your student loan bill?
• What can you learn by exploring your weird invention idea? (uh... a LOT)
• What ways were you creative as a child? Where did it go?
• What could you learn, while having fun, with a stack of books in a coffee shop?
• What impossible idea do you have that would require you to learn your way out of it?

Maybe creativity, confidence, and curiosity are your new tuition.

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Our friend, Bryan, makes an extra income by selling clothing on eBay. I enjoy selling on eBay about as much catching the black death, so I was quizzing him on how he does it and why he enjoys it. I wanted to know why he didn’t expand his operation, didn’t sell more items, didn’t use some extra money to buy more products. His answer? 

“That’s when it stops being fun.”

Something clicked for me. He’s found the trick to sustainability... He’s learned how to truly enjoy something. Enough is actually the Best. We live in a culture of BiggerBetterFasterMore and I think, some day in the foreseeable future, everyone’s head might explode. 

We're learning our version of keeping it fun: inventing, good design, bamboo, beers on Friday, new friendships, handshake-deals without lawyer-contracts, writing weird blog posts... And we've found it's now more fun to go to work on Monday.

How can you keep it fun?

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 It’s a cool, relaxing Saturday night. With a glass of scotch at my side and surrounded by friends at the dinner table, I’m handily winning (probably not) the board game we are playing. I’m building my railroads to cut off Daniel (making him angry is one of the best parts of the game) and exerting my strategy for total domination. All is right with this world on a dreamy evening.

 Then. It happens like it happens a hundred times a day. I subconsciously disconnect from my friends and board-game-domination to pull out my iPhone and check my email. Why? I don’t know. You do it too. I know you do.

 I’m confronted with an irate, long winded email from a person in Bulgaria who is angry that his package, about a week after mailing, hasn’t arrived. Mentally, I’m quickly taken from my friends and into my head, worrying about someone’s anger. It bugged me for the rest of the weekend.

 So I came up with an experiment. I took my business email account off my phone. If I’m gonna do work, I’ll have to be at my computer. Instantly, I started noticing things: the sky was beautiful blue, a drive in the car became a fun escape again, and I started really being with people more. I now will often turn off my phone for a whole day. The feeling of getting off the hamster wheel is great.

 Technology is here to stay. And yes, I think technology is a really awesome thing.  I enjoy my iPhone and MacBook Air. Hell, we make cases for them. But at what point does technology burn us out? I hear people talking about how they loathe their email and, seemingly, their life. Wasn’t email supposed to be a helpful thing ten years ago?

 Remember when it was okay to wait ten minutes to answer an email or text message? Remember when the stress of something couldn’t electronically follow you to dinner with your spouse? What if you took the Facebook status out of your sunset, the emails out of your crisp-aired morning drive, and the text messages out of your face-to-face friendships?

 We’re big fans of 1) People and 2) Creating really cool stuff that we believe in. But #2 should never be moved to #1… what if your iPhone’s case was purposefully - and beautifully - designed to be a small barrier between your family dinner and your e-everything? Ha!

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 After doing some work on taxes a while back, I found that I had been over-billed $110 by TurboTax. I hunted down a customer service rep who fixed the problem. I got a survey from them yesterday and here is what I wrote back to them:

"The lady that helped me was very helpful, prompt, and knowledgable. If you guys don't give her a big ol' raise, you're stupid idiots. I was a little pissed about my TurboTax bill (an extra $110?) and she took care of the error like a bat-outta-hell. She actually made my day and I was happier in the end, after she corrected the problem, than if my bill was correct in the first place. Hooray TurboTaxLady! As for you guys: make your billing more transparent so I don't have to leave you for - gasp - someone else. Thanks!"

I was actually happier after needing - and tracking down - someone to correct my problem. I know, it doesn’t really make sense to me either. But I think, just think, that maybe we all just like having other people around, especially when those other people are enjoyable. Maybe we will change from “customer service” to “People Time.”

You don’t have more time. You’re getting older. You’re giving birth to more children and buying more cars and more houses and more responsibility.

What are you - Yes You - a genius at? Yes. You do have it. You have what it takes.

What do you want to create? A women’s shelter? A whopper-doodad-invention? A community of people that take care of each other? Want to learn how to paint? Dig up your dreams. Big or small, they are equally important.

Your fear doesn’t want you to create. Fear has teamed up with your TV, your job, your broken fridge, and all those little details to keep you going in circles for the next 100 years.

You vs. Fear. Who is stopping who?

Blackbox Case started in my small woodshop. I wanted to make a hardshell wood MacBook Pro case for myself so I could quit crushing my laptops while traveling around. It turned out great. The first one! Then I got to thinking maybe I should make these for other people too! Then fear – my perfectionism – set in. What if one breaks? What if I screw something up? What if I fail? What if people don’t like it? What if…? 

Fear almost killed it. Blackbox Case almost didn’t happen. But we kept going. It was scary as hell and still is sometimes. A mentor from my childhood, Daryl, told me once, “What’s the worst thing you can do when driving your car through a mud pit? Stop. A stuck car is the hardest to get moving.”

What if You confronted Your greatness? What would that look like?

-and please share with us!

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 Today, if just today... Go out and give 'er Hell.

We're not gonna be bashful. These new MacBook Air cases make us laugh. They're simply amazing. The detailed figure of the bamboo. The epic, flawless finish applied by Anthony. The 2 degree "wedge" shape to custom fit the MacBook Air. The crisp laser engraving. Here's an 11" we made for our friend Dave over at Path:

Three days left on our Kickstarter Bamboo Blackbox Case launch! We recently blew through our funding goal and are currently 153% funded. You guys are simply awesome. If you go to bed Wednesday without pledging, you've missed out!