Krafty Case

Krafty Case sells laser-engraved cherry wood iPhone cases set into a shock-absorbing TPU frame, engraved with Hawaiʻi motifs like honu and hibiscus alongside art-deco patterns. Cherry was the only material I carried. Maple and bamboo variants were planned for a later order, assuming the business could support the inventory.

I registered the LLC in 2023 and launched the storefront in May 2024. I started it with money I had saved growing up, to find out how far I could get running an entire business rather than just building the website for one. I registered the LLC, obtained an EIN from the IRS, opened business banking, sourced the product, and built the storefront on Shopify. I shot the product photography myself on Oʻahu, wrote the brand and product copy, ran paid acquisition through Meta Ads, and fulfilled orders from Hawaiʻi to the mainland using Shopify-generated shipping labels through USPS.

Taking on every role meant learning most of them from scratch, and that took longer than I expected. Sales tax, refund policy, shipping thresholds, response times, and what a customer actually expects when a package is late were all things I had to work out as they came up, usually while something else needed attention. The store took real orders and produced real revenue, and I closed out every order without a refund dispute.

What I took away from it was less about the revenue than the confidence. I had not known whether I could handle the parts of a business that are not building things, and finding out that I could made me feel considerably more independent. It also changed how I read other businesses. When I research a client now before building their site, I am reading it as someone who has had to price a product, pay for an ad that did not convert, and answer the email afterward.

Krafty Case is currently on pause, and the honest reason is that I underestimated customer acquisition. Inventory turned out to be manageable once Shopify was tracking it, but ad spend was not. Paid acquisition consistently ate the margin on a product priced in the twenties, and I had not modeled that before committing to inventory. What I got in exchange was a real education in targeting a domestic audience and reading campaign performance rather than guessing at it.

The business also ran through a stretch when my father had a stroke and my grandfather passed away while I was in school, and running every function of a company alone through that was not sustainable. I closed it out with sales on the books and no unresolved orders, which I am satisfied with. The next time I take on a product business, I will calculate acquisition cost against unit margin before I order inventory rather than after, and I will not attempt to be the only person in the company.