Hasta La Gadget!

This is certainly an innovative and chic mixture of the new and the old if ever there was one.

Design firm Maruwakaya specialize in stylish consumer goods that collaborate with contemporary brands and traditional crafts. They previously worked with Puma to produce an extraordinary wooden bento box. Now they have created a cover for your iPhone made out of lacquer and deerskin leather (known as “inden” or 印伝/印傳), a technique famous in Yamanashi. As you can see below, this is not only an original choice of materials but the results are very striking too.

What the inden technique does is it makes leather-ware highly durable; ideal for handsets that you take everywhere around with you. The product comes in four different colors and designs. It also comes with a wooden box but, with a price tag between 11 and 12,500 JPY (c.$110-250), this is definitely not a casual purchase. Manufactured in strictly limited numbers and only available online, Maruwakaya is taking orders to be shipped in February at time of writing.