Who owns Casetify, the smartphone accessories brand?

Casetify is famous for injecting color into the tech space, which often tends to look dull and boring. Sure, its offerings are priced higher (over $60 for a phone case may seem ridiculous to many), but the company’s more expensive cases are usually worth it because they’re well-built and offer solid protection. So how did a company that focuses solely on expensive phone accessories become so big? Who owns Casetify?

Casetify is a private company headquartered in Hong Kong with offices in various locations like Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Taipei, to name a few. Co-founded in 2011 by Wesley Ng and Ronald Yeung, it is a true success story and a great example of “making it happen”. From humble beginnings, Casetify eventually became so big in the accessories business that some of its partnerships include Bandai Namco, allowing it to roll out a collection of Tamagotchi-inspired products for the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy – no small feat by any means.

Despite its success, the brand retains its friendly charm. Casetify is still founder-led, and while it is large in the phone accessories market, it remains a mid-sized company employing fewer than 1,000 people. It’s relatively common for companies (sometimes even large portions) to be owned by private equity firms, but Casetify is going against the grain, so to speak. The only external investor to date is Andrew Cheng of C Ventures, who owns a 10% stake in Casetify, meaning the founders retain a majority stake to this day.

Being an early bird who gets the worm doesn’t just apply to waking up in the morning: it’s also true for running a business, and Casetify is proof. In 2011, when the fourth generation iPhones were released, Wesley Ng quickly bought one. The co-founder was disappointed with the cases available at the time. He believed that, while providing protection, they ruined the design of the phone. So the idea was born to use the case as a sort of canvas, allowing users to express themselves with a case that looked decent. Initially, Casetify started as a simple e-commerce platform where customers could order fully personalized cases with their own photos.

With only $200,000 in capital, the platform was far from the lifestyle brand it is today. He eventually achieved such success that he partnered with giants ranging from BMW and Disney to Gen Z pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo. Ng believes that the key to the company’s success is that it has rewritten the narrative around smartphone cases as a simple product, with a single purpose of protection, making it a tool for self-expression.

The key word to its success, one might say, is authenticity. Casetify’s mission is to transform dull objects into artistic canvases, and this philosophy permeates most of its releases, not just phone cases. Let’s take Casetify’s entry into the hand luggage space as an example. It took something as boring as luggage and made it another means of self-expression.