dbrand’s Cool New ‘Touch Grass’ Cases Aren’t An April Fool’s Prank
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Over the past couple of decades, there’s been a trend in the tech industry for companies to “celebrate” April 1st — April Fools’ Day — by publishing silly press releases on non-existent products and wild rumors.
Thankfully, that’s been dying down in recent years, but today is still not the ideal time for any company to try to release a legitimate product or service. It’s quaint to think today that even Gmail, which made its debut on April 1, 2004, was dismissed as an April Fools’ joke since the notion of a free service giving away a whopping 1 GB of storage was hard to believe in an era when rivals like Hotmail only offered 2 MB.
In some cases, products that initially began as April Fools’ Day jokes ended up being real in response to custom demand. Popular iPhone accessory maker Twelve South was well known for doing this. I still have a Stone’r on my living room table.
Still, plenty of companies ignore April Fools Day entirely, even going so far as to make product announcements on April 1 with no regard for how they could be perceived. For example, Verizon kicked off a $1,000 trade-in offer for broken phones on April 1, 2021, and Cloudflare unveiled its free VPN on April 1, 2019. These were both serious products that just happened to be announced on April Fools Day.
Then there’s dbrand, which uses the opportunity to launch real products that are whimsical and sometimes even “drenched in satire,” as CEO Adam Ijaz calls it. Previous years saw the release of such fun entries as the Doomsday Kit and The DIY Project, but this time around, it’s leaning more into the whimsy.
You may remember dbrand from its Crocs-like Vision Pro cover that we wrote about in February. While the company is better known for making a lineup of solid but relatively normal-looking iPhone cases, it’s decided to take us back to nature with Touch Grass.
As the name suggests, this is a new lineup of cases to cover everything from your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to your Steam Desk and Xbox in — you guessed it — grass.
You tell yourself you’ll go outside. Tomorrow. Next weekend. Eventually. The machine knows you won’t. The solution? Turn the machine into grass. Experience a simpler, happier time. Touch grass — without touching grass.
Don’t worry, though; you won’t have to water it as it’s not real grass. Instead, dbrand has figured out how “to simulate grass at a microscopic scale” — something that took the company well over a year. Ijaz tells us these new cases were supposed to be last year’s April release, but the company’s engineers had a much easier time coming up with the product’s name than working out the manufacturing process.
From learning how to electrostatically flock polyethylene strands to figuring out how we could cut the skins without getting fake grass clippings all over our equipment, it’s been a bit of a ride.
Adam Ijaz, dbrand CEO
Electrostatic flocking is a clever technique that uses an electrical charge to make each strand “stand upright and propel directly onto an adhesive-coated surface,” ensuring the “grass” remains perpendicular to the back of the case. The result is over 1,000 strands of fake grass for each centimeter of the case’s surface.
The “grass” is also securely embedded into the adhesive layer to ensure it won’t flake off and get inside your devices. Ijaz says the company ran the grass skins through 10,000 abrasive rub cycles for durability testing to ensure they’d stay put. A laser-cutting technique creates enough heat to cauterize the stands, preventing them from breaking off at the edges.
Touch Grass is available in skin form only for recent iPhone models, starting at $34.95, or as part of dbrand’s Grip Case, starting at $69.90. There are also skins for a wide range of MacBooks going back to 2016 and iPads as far back as 2020, plus a variety of other devices from Asus, Google, Nintendo, Samsung, Microsoft, Sony, and Valve. Like the Vision Pro cover, Touch Grass is a limited-edition product, so you’ll want to order now if this is something that appeals to you.
